Antwerp

As Bolano’s friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarría, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano’s fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolano’s enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard—which Bolano chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he’d written it (“and even that I can’t be certain of”)—as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.

Antwerp’s fractured narration in 54 sections—voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolano” all speak—moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.