**Antwerp's signature elements - crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits - mark this, his first novel, as pure Bolaño. A elegantly produced, small collectible stamped cover-on-cloth edition.** As Bolaño's friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarría, once suggested, *Antwerp* can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaño's fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolaño's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard - which Bolaño 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 Bolaño' all speak - moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone. .
Description:
**Antwerp's signature elements - crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits - mark this, his first novel, as pure Bolaño. A elegantly produced, small collectible stamped cover-on-cloth edition.** As Bolaño's friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarría, once suggested, *Antwerp* can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaño's fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolaño's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard - which Bolaño 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 Bolaño' all speak - moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone. .