Antwerp

As Bola�簣o's friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarr�簫a, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bola�簣o's fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bola�簣o's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard--which Bola�簣o chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he'd written it (��nd even that I can't be certain of��--as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.

Antwerp's fractured narration in 54 sections--voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from ��oberto Bola�簣o��all speak--moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.