Antwerp

<p><i>Antwerp</i> was Roberto Bolaño’s first novel, though he chose not to publish it until 2002, more than twenty years after he’d written it.<br><br> Set amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites on the Costa Brava, and filled with hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen, <i>Antwerp</i> 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 Bolaño’.<br><br> Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature; reading it is to be present at the birth of Bolaño’s enterprise in prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.</p>