Antwerp

by Roberto Bolaño, Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

Overview

“It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving.” —Nicole Krauss, The Guardian

Oft called the “big bang” of Roberto Bolaño’s universe, Antwerp is his first novel—or the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bolaño drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño’s oeuvre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250898173
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96

About the Author

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was the author of The Savage Detectives and 2666, among many other notable works. Born in Santiago, Chile, he later lived in Mexico City, Paris, and Barcelona. His accolades include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Herralde de Novela Award, and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He died at the age of fifty and is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation.

Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.
Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.

What People are Saying About This

Roberto Bolano

The only novel that doesn't embarrass me is Antwerp.

Editorial Reviews

With Bolaño you rarely feel beset by monotony. Certainly not in Antwerp, a tiny, unclassifiable book that will be of interest mainly to his most devoted fans.
—The New York Times

Michael Greenberg

The dead and wildly fashionable Bolaño (2666) seems doomed to have all of his scribblings published. Hence this slapdash collation of 56 cinematic gestures set in 1980 Barcelona and featuring a nervous South American narrator named Roberto Bolaño, who is fascinated by facade versus reality, observes himself as if from the outside, and records random scenes (i.e., a hunchback eating sardines from a can in the woods). Alternately, elements of a detective plot are set up but hardly developed and involve a police sergeant searching for someone (perhaps the hunchback) and a nameless young woman (red-haired, a drug addict, a witness) sodomized by a cop—or is it the narrator? Bolaño derides conventional story lines (“rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels”) in favor of recording senseless, disjointed snippets of speech, errant impressions, and sensations. Collectively, these might be viewed as the paranoid, manic musings of a writer desperately searching for material. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Literature’s new patron saint."

New York Magazine - Sam Anderson

"The real thing and the rarest."

Susan Sontag

"There is great value if you are already a devotee."

The Morning News, Boston - Robert Birnbaum

"Never less than mesmerizing."

The Los Angeles Times

Antwerp is a total avant-garde freakout, and has to be among the most linguistically beautiful things Bolano wrote.”

Garth Risk Hallberg - The Millions

The only novel that doesn't embarrass me is Antwerp.”

Roberto Bolano

Antwerp is a total avant-garde freakout, and has to be among the most linguistically beautiful things Bolaño wrote.— Garth Risk Hallberg

The Millions