Amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites of the Costa Brava, someone has gone missing.
A detective sets out to find them. They search among the hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen that populate this dream world – but every door opens onto a nightmare.
An experimental novella, spliced together in vignettes, Antwerp is Roberto Bolaño’s first work of fiction. A personal declaration of the power of literature, to read it is to be present at ‘the big bang’ of Bolaño’s enterprise into prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER
'A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolaño fan’s bookshelf' Daily Telegraph
‘Bolaño set a new speed limit for literature. He simply wrote past other authors... His books are volcanic, perilous, charged with infectious erotic energy and demonic lucidity’ Benjamín Labatut, author of The Maniac
A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolaño fan’s bookshelf . . . the sentences whizz over your head like bullets. ― Daily Telegraph
It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño. ― Guardian
There is great value if you are already a devotee. ― The Morning News, Boston
About the Author
Roberto Bolaño 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.
