Some things happened in this book, though I don't know what. I read and was pissed off with each page I began reading for the day, hypnotized by the third. The language is clear and precise and bright, and you can see everything. Sentences smack like water balloons exploding on walls, impossible to ignore and then dripping away. You can't mistake each image even as it dissolves incomprehensibly into the next. A true novel in montage, unmoored and punkily uninterested in you; a scrappy little shit unflinchingly sure of itself. (Someone applauds.) I am to understand that this is Bolano's first work and it feels that genuine. That it is what Bolano always wanted to do with his fiction and he did it out of the gate ��� and maybe he struggled with everything after trying to be more accessible.Antwerp is what style is made of. Antwerp is what it means to define your own paradigm. It is unsettling, fragmented, and fractured. A detective novel that operates as human memory and experience, turns the reader into the detective and acts as the synaptic mind.Thank you to New Directions for their continued commitment to the Bolano catalog and to putting out their most beautiful edition yet of Bolano's work.Philip Swanstrom Shaw
What do You think about Anversa (2007)?
It reminded me of Queneau at his most lyrical. Maybe it was just all the trains.
—bob
this is Bolaño's best book so shut the fuck up
—danbar06
