Pronoy Sarkar reviewed Antwerp on OfftheShelf.com. When Writers Write For Themselves by Pronoy SarkarAntwerp is a funny little book. It’s comprised of 54 sections and is hardly eighty pages in length. I say “sections” because chapters suggest something complete, a beginning and an end, an unfolding of events. Sections, however, are more open-ended, neutral; they merely act as distinguishing marks, and say nothing of the content. The section names are oblique and provide the reader with very little by way of direction. In some cases, they feel like an afterthought, as if chosen after the section was written, like when editors name untitled poems by their opening line. Bolaño uses prosaic names like “The Sheet,” “The Redhead,” “Twenty-seven,” and oddly ominous names like “Footsteps on the Stairs.” In fact, they appear so random, it may be that they’re entirely conscious; that Bolaño sought first an image, an impression, a concept, and decided to explore it thoroughly through prose. Antwerp is the length of a novella, but only loosely attempts at narrative story-telling; more so, it feels like a shattered mirror, the reader having to rummage through the pieces and recognize where the angles connect.It is exactly the kind of literature I divine to find. Where the writer has chosen not to appeal to a reader, a market, but to an impulse which makes sense of life through writing; an inspection, so to speak, of feelings, signals, and moments. Bolaño seems to be thinking through these ideas as he writes, thereby forgoing the need to set a scene or play by the rules of narrative story-telling. Instead what we read is a compressed sprawl of the Bolaño universe, which explodes and contracts, spirals and fades, touching nonetheless on themes that consume him: crime, corruption, the seedy side of street life, drugs, sex, and rebellion. Calling Antwerp a novella is inaccurate; it’s more so a prose-poem.Antwerp was completed in 1980 when Bolaño was twenty-seven years old. It wasn’t published until 2002, the year before his death. The books we recognize: The Savage Detectives, 2666, and The Third Reich (published posthumously) are works that came to define his literary legacy, and which, in many ways, proclaimed him a novelist. But it’s been noted that Bolaño truly wanted to be remembered as a poet, and it’s in his early writings — in our case, Antwerp — where we can see his preoccupation with poetry germinate and flourish. As described on the book’s jacket, Bolaño called Antwerp “the only novel that doesn’t embarrass me.”To me, Bolaño’s sections are replete with mesmerizing prose, of images often replacing descriptions; it never fails to attempt at something, to recover what’s lost through writing and re-writing. It’s not something I would recommend widely, but it is a book I would take with me on a long train ride. Because as I read it, and re-read it, I feel as though I’m in that room with a young Roberto Bolaño, standing behind him as he struggles to put thought to paper, writing not because it’s a profession, but because writing is therapy, a way of seeing. Antwerp, then, is the man himself, stripped of contrivance and allure, writing to free himself of his own demons.
"i wrote this book for myself, and even that i can't be sure of. for a long time these were just loose pages that i reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced i had no time. but time for what? i couldn't say exactly. i wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. after the last rereading (just now), i realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage..."when bolaño wrote those words in 2002, so as to introduce antwerp upon its first publication, it had already been some twenty-two years since the book had been written. considered his first novel, antwerp cannot properly be described as a "novel" in any real sense, but then bolaño's writing has always defied easy classification anyway. this slim work is comprised of fifty-six short passages, each no more than a very long paragraph. while antwerp has a few recurring characters, it revolves around only the barest of plots. what is most intriguing about this slim work is that so many of bolaño's trademark themes, character types, and creative stylings are in clear gestation. shady cops, nameless women, unsolved violence, sexual aggression, transient nobodies, anonymous settings (campgrounds, beaches, etc.), and a love for literature; it's no wonder a close friend of bolaño described this as his "big bang." his singular prose is already well developed (as his years of writing and reading poetry evidently paid off), and although this is the earliest of works, there is no real hint of amateurish haste. nearly each of the segments in antwerp concludes with a few, sometimes seemingly unrelated, quotations (by the character? the narrator? the ever-present author?), written as if bolaño had an image, thought, or phrase in his mind that he simply had to commit to paper. "the writer, i think he was english, confessed to the hunchback how hard it was for him to write. all i can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences. desolation must be something like that, said the hunchback." it is easy to imagine bolaño furiously scribbling out the pages that would become this book, overcome by a gift he was just learning to wield effectively. antwerp is an essential read for anyone even mildly interested in bolaño's works. with nearly a dozen of his works available in english (and the remainder soon to come), it is a treasure to behold antwerp now, so as to look back and imagine a yet to be discovered talent in the infancy of its white-hot brilliance.of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all i wish to recover is the 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...
What do You think about Antwerp (2010)?
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)For those who don't know, in recent years the new poster-child for American intellectuals has become the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano, for a whole perfect storm of small reasons: a former leftist political radical who wrote manytimes impenetrably dense yet poetic manuscripts, his rough-and-tumble life led to his early death just a year before the first of his dozen books started getting published in English, a combination of circumstances that apparently the NPR crowd can't get enough of. And indeed, I was a big fan as well of the first Bolano book I read, 1996's Nazi Literature in the Americas, an inventive speculative experiment in which he details Wikipedia-style a whole series of fake fascist intellectuals in both North and South America who never actually existed; but as I've come to realize while trying to make my way these last six months through his magnum opus 2666 (which I'm still only halfway done with), and have now seen confirmed in his very first book Antwerp, when lacking a compelling subject matter to hold a particular manuscript together, Bolano's writing tends to devolve into typical flowery academic horsesh-t territory, as if he was literally sitting there with a giant stack of other books in front of him while writing his own, picking random sentences from random volumes and writing them down in an random order and calling it "art." Antwerp is especially bad at this, a collection of half-page unrelated semi-prose pieces that sound like they were written on the backs of bar napkins to prove to drunk girls how deep he was, and I have to say that if this is the kind of stuff I can expect from the rest of Bolano's untranslated oeuvre, then I'm not looking forward to the rest of Bolano's untranslated oeuvre whatsoever. I definitely plan on trying to finish 2666, and also plan on reading The Savage Detectives, easily his best-received book so far in the US, and like Nazi Literature containing a strong theme holding the entire manuscript together (young wandering South American political rebels, that is); but for sure from this point on, I'm going to be a lot choosier about which Bolano projects I decide to take on, a lesson I unfortunately had to learn the hard way in this case.Out of 10: 2.2
—Jason Pettus
“I wrote this book for the ghosts” says the author, before adding that this “my only novel that doesn’t embarrass me…” The thing is though that this book is not neither a novel, nor a novella; it’s not even a short story collection. If anyone asked me I would say that what we have here is a collection of clippings of life and of random thoughts that somehow manage to meet at one point or another and thus make sense. The author is doing here what he does best; he’s playing. He’s playing with the words and the meanings and a non linear sense of time in order to tell the reader a story in shards; the story of a writer that struggles with words and the story of a hunchback; the story of a red-haired prostitute and the cop that abuses her. And also the story of a day and one more. All that takes place in the city of Barcelona. If there’s one thing that stands out in this small book, apart from the literary acrobatics, is the way the author drops into the text his cues; the cues that don’t seem to have anything to do with the story but somehow manage to make it better. Here are a few examples: “Forget the gesture that never came”, “Monogamy moves with the same rigidity as the train”, “There are silences made just for us”, “The gun was only a word”, “Loneliness is an aspect of natural human egotism”, “Only the inventors survive”, “Destroy your stray phrases”, “Everything is the projection of a forlorn kid”. Antwerp is not one of those books that have a beginning, a middle and an ending. The author seems more interested in walking on a tightrope made of words than telling a story. What he brings to light are parts of his inner world: his dreams, his thoughts and even his delusions. And for once again he reminds us of old man Borges, because every now and then he tends to address the reader with a mocking smile, as if implying that he’s not to be taken seriously by anyone. Bolaño seems to be changing costumes and roles all the time and so he sometimes becomes the author, other times the reader and yet other times the protagonist of the book; the god of his own creation. I’m certain that anyone who’s familiar with his work will enjoy this small gem of a book.
—Lakis Fourouklas
در یک کلام ویرانکننده! «آنتورپ» تشکیل شده از قطعاتی کوتاه و شاعرانه، شبیهِ تکهتکههای خاطراتی که در طول داستان از جلوی چشمان خواننده عبور میکنند. تصاویری از "گوژپشتی که قوزش را به کاج کوچک و پوسیدهای تکیه داده و کنسرو ساردین و سُس گوجه میخورد"، "صورتهایی با چشمهای بسته و دهانهایی گشوده که لامتاکام حرف نمیزنند"، "کارگرانی که دستمزدشان را بصورت هروئین دریافت میکنند" و روبرتو بولانیویی که به یکی از کاراکترهای مکزیکی داستان کمک میکند چون " او هم سالها پیش عاشق دختری مکزیکی بوده". بولانیو در این اثرش سرکشانه قواعد رمان را برهم میزند و آنچنان از «زبان» بهره میگیرد که رمان را تبدیل به شعری ناب میکندهمانطور که در بعدالتحریر آنتورپ خاطر نشان کرده: بگذار نوشتههایم شبیه اشعار «لئوپاردی» باشند که «دانیل بیگا» روی پُلی نوردیک از بر میخواند تا خود را به شجاعت مجهز کند
—Alborz Baghipour
