Antwerp

As Bolaos friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarra, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaos fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolaos enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboardwhich Bolao chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after hed written it (and even that I cant 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 sectionsvoices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from Roberto Bolao all speakmoves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone. Krimi. A police sergeant searches for someone (perhaps a hunchback) and a nameless young woman (red-haired, a drug addict, a witness) sodomized by a cop - or is it the narrator? A collation of 56 "scenes" set in 1980 Barcelona