Antwerp (Paperback, 2012, New Directions)
Paperback, 96 pages
Published April 24, 2012 by New Directions.
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.
I’ve not read something of this sort in a long time. It’s quite sporadic, notably ambiguous, and yet raw. Bolaño gives just enough substance to set the scene but leaves an ambiguous gap for you to interpret the rest. It doesn’t start off impressive but it builds, it builds well and frankly a little nauseating.
