Antwerp - Roberto Bolao

Antwerp was Roberto Bolao's first novel, though he chose not to publish it until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd written it.

Set amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites on the Costa Brava, and filled with hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen, Antwerp 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 Bolao'.

Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature; reading it is to be present at the birth of Bolao's enterprise in prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.