As Bolanos friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolanos fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolanos enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboardwhich Bolano 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.

Antwerps fractured narration in 54 sectionsvoices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from Roberto Bolano all speakmoves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.