Name: Antwerp
ISBN: 9780811217170

Roberto Bolaño

A police sergeant searches for someone (perhaps a hunchback) and a nameless young woman (red-haired, a drug addict, a witness) sodomized by a cop--or is it the narrator? A collation of 56 "scenes" set in 1980 Barcelona.

Antwerp

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.  

Alex Noble

Roberto Bolano

'A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolaño fan's bookshelf . . . the sentences whizz over your head like bullets' Daily Telegraph Antwerp was Roberto Bolaño's first novel, though he chose not to publish it until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd written it. Set amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites on the Costa Brava, and filled with hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen, Antwerp is a short and cinematic experimental crime novel spliced together with voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from 'Roberto Bolaño'. Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature; reading it is to be present at the birth of Bolaño's enterprise in prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes. 'It's hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño' Nicole Krauss, Guardian

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!

Eli Alvah Huckabee

london

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 

michael mann

Donald

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.