Antwerp

A fascinating even compulsory addition to the Bolaño fans bookshelf . . . the sentences whizz over your head like bullets Daily Telegraph Antwerp was Roberto Bolaños first novel though he chose not to publish it until 2002 more than twenty years after hed 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 passersby 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 Bolaños enterprise in prose to see the beginning to witness the moment when his talent explodes. Its hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño Nicole Krauss Guardian