Reviews
So hard. Bound to reread this soonest, out of everything I’ve read in the past several years, if I were to bet on what. Supremely frank the whole way through and then suddenly that beaten, optimistic postscript.
The supposed inadvertent predecessor to the Nocilla Trilogy according to Mallo. And I believe him. It’s similar in form and zaniness, but very different in tone, delivery, and general content. I want really a fan of a lot of what was going on and how it was all spat out, but the idea is so cool and the prose/poetry (proetry?) was pretty boss. I get why Bolaño is so highly regarded and I get why he never submitted this because it wasn’t publishable. Ready to read 2666 now!
Bolano was a poet first, novelist second, and in no work of his is that more apparent than Antwerp. Beautiful, haunting, slightly disjointed but always enjoyable.
veeeery kooky and inspired. reminds me of invisible cities by calvino. i love latin american lit
This is an extended prose poem separated into numbered sections. It is not a novel. What is this book about? Film (especially pornography), murder, police, violence, autobiography, writing, literature, sex, speech, Spain, foreignness. Kaput. There are a lot of themes and elements here that will be familiar to habitual Bolaño users, but this is the most structurally experimental work of his I've read. It works very well, in this biased obsever's opinion.
