by Roberto Bolaño · Pan Macmillan · tapa dura · ISBN 9780330510585
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Antwerp is Bolaño intensified and distilled. It can be viewed as the Big Bang of his fictional universe. It is the birth of Bolaño’s enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. It’s a short book, with short chapters, each like a prose poem, and from this springboard he plunged into the unexplored depths of the modern novel for which he is now revered. In fifty-six sections, the fractured narration moves in multiple directions spliced together with an experimental crime novel set on the Costa Brava are voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from Roberto Bolaño. This is a deep and meditative work the result of a highly personal wrestling with the form of the novel itself. The author sets out to ensure, wilfully, that this is a novel like no other and the aim is nothing less than to find in the written word a powerful and sustaining life force.
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel The Savage Detectives, and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages".
