Antwerp (Unabridged‪)‬

Bolaño’s radical first novel makes its audiobook debut as a New Directions Pearl.

Written when he was only 27, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano’s fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis of Bolano’s enterprise in prose; all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard—which Bolano chose to publish in 2002, 20 years after he’d written it (“and even that I can’t be certain of”)—as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.

Voices speak from a dream, from a nightmare, from passersby, from an omniscient narrator, from "Roberto Bolaño". Antwerp’s fractured narration in 54 sections moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.