Antwerp (7 page)

"Never less than mesmerizing." —
Th
e
Lo
s
Angele
s
Time
s

"Bolaño has proven that literature can do anything." —Jonathan Lethem,
Th
e
Ne
w
Yor
k
Time
s

As Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño's friend and literary executor, once suggested,
Antwer
p
can be viewed as the Big Bang of Bolaño's fictional universe: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment that his talent explodes. Bolaño chose to publish
Antwer
p
in 2002
,
twentytwo years after he'd written it: "I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can't be sure of."

In 54 sections, the novel's fractured narration moves in multiple directions, splicing together an experimental crime novel.
Antwer
p
is, in Bolaño's words, radical and solitary. "Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength."

Born in Chile and raised in Mexico before going abroad and writing most of his books in Spain, Roberto Bolaño (1953 2003), has been acclaimed as "funny, furious and frightening" (The London TLS), "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag), and "exceptionally entertaining" (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post).

Natasha Wimmer
's translation of Roberto Bolaño's
266
6
won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2008.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

"THE ONLY NOVEL THAT DOESN'T EMBARRASS ME IS ANTWERP."

— ROBERTO BOLAÑO