“Legendary . . . Bolaño has proven [that literature] can do anything.” —Jonathan Lethem,
The New York Times Book Review
“A supernova of creativity whose light is still arriving at our shores.” —Giles Harvey,
The New Yorker
Often 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 old, 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,
is an essential part of Bolaño’s oeuvre.