Antwerp

About the Book: Antwerp

Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature

Antwerp was Roberto Bolano's first novel, though he chose not to publish it until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd 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 passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from 'Roberto Bolano'. Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature; reading it is to be present at the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.

About the Author: Roberto Bolano

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolano (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 Romulo 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. Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclan Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his Bolano translations.