Antwerp (novel)

Antwerp (Amberes in Spanish) is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was written in 1980 but only published in 2002, a year before the author's death. An English translation by Natasha Wimmer, was published in 2010.

Considered by Bolaño's literary executor Ignacio Echevarría to be the big bang of the Bolaño universe, the loose prose-poem novel was written when Bolaño was 27. Antwerp contains a loose narrative structured less around a story arc and more around motifs, reappearing characters and anecdotes — many of which went on to become common material for Bolaño's other works of fiction - crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits. Bolaño had once stated that Antwerp was "The only novel that doesn't make me blush."