Antwerp

(Paperback)

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Description

A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolano's work - now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time. 'A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolano fan's bookshelf' - Daily Telegraph 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.

Reviews

A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolao fans bookshelf . . . the sentences whizz over your head like bullets. * Daily Telegraph *
Its hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolao. * Guardian *
There is great value if you are already a devotee. * The Morning News, Boston *

Author Bio

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.