"I bought this book during a trip to a place I didn't necessarily want to be. The bookseller flipped through each page as if he couldn't believe what he was holding, then demanded: 'What is this? A book of prose poems?' I'm still not sure. Roberto Bolaño's fragments, littered with images and shocking turns, read more like a map than a novel. I won't claim to know what this book wants from me, or what lies at the end—all I know is it's hard to return from that kind of journey."
Publisher New Directions
Publication Date 2012-05-23
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Archived Staff Suggestions / Spencer R.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780811219914
Bolano’s radical first novel makes its paperback debut as a New Directions Pearl.
Written when he was only twenty-seven, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano’s fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis 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.
Voices speak from a dream, from a nightmare, from passersby, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolano.” Antwerp’s fractured narration in fifty-four sections moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.
