Antwerp

Considered the "big bang" of Roberto Bolaño's universe, Antwerp is his first novel--or perhaps the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely solitary, so strange, that he didn't share it with any publishers at the time; yet, decades later, he called it the only novel that didn't embarrass him. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a deserted highway, a seaside campground, an abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere, just beyond reach, a young, fevered writer named Roberto Bolaño drifts in and out of view. A haunting, radical, and utterly singular effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño's oeuvre.