Roberto Bolano: Antwerp

can"… "A tenyearold girl is the only one left, she waves to me whenever she sees me"… "She sat alone on the terrace of the bar, next to the dance floor, and she wasn't hard to find"… On the screen, the Nagas appear. Spectators and a cloud of mosquitoes. I glanced to the right: distant lights of the tennis courts. I felt like falling asleep right there. These are the elements: "impassivity," "perseverance," "blond hair." The next morning she was no longer in her tent. Along the deathdoomed European highways her parents' car glides. On the way to Lyon, Geneva, Bruges? On the way to Antwerp? He looked around wearily: waxing moon, the crowns of pine trees silhouetted against the sky, the sound of sirens in the distance. But I'm safe here, he said, the killer didn't recognize me and he's gone. Blackandwhite scene of a man who heads into the woods after the screening. Final images of adults napping as a strange car moves to encounter a greater brightness.

Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.

BARCELONA 1980

Roberto Bolaño

"Never less than mesmerizing." — The Los Angeles Times

"Bolaño has proven that literature can do anything." — Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times

As Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño's friend and literary executor, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Bolaño's fictional universe: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment that his talent explodes. Bolaño chose to publish Antwerp in 2002, twentytwo years after he'd written it: "I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can't be sure of."

In 54 sections, the novel's fractured narration moves in multiple directions, splicing together an experimental crime novel. Antwerp is, in Bolaño's words, radical and solitary. "Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength."

Born in Chile and raised in Mexico before going abroad and writing most of his books in Spain, Roberto Bolaño (1953 2003), has been acclaimed as "funny, furious and frightening" (The London TLS ), "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag), and "exceptionally entertaining" (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post ).

Natasha Wimmer's translation of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2008.