Antwerp - Softcover

Bolaño, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811217175 ISBN 13: 9780811217170

Publisher: New Directions, 2012

Synopsis

Bolaño’s radical first novel makes its paperback debut as a New Directions Pearl.

Written when he was only twenty-seven, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaño’s fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis 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.

Voices speak from a dream, from a nightmare, from passersby, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolaño.” Antwerp’s fractured narration in fifty-four sections moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.

About this title

About the Authors

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.

Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 won the National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year as well as the PEN Prize.

Reviews

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)
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Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811217175
• ISBN 13: 9780811217170
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96