Recognition comes late

ROBERTO BOLANO was an explosive talent, yet for much of his life he endured in obscurity, railing against the system, drifting hand-to-mouth and needle-to-arm, vagabond-style, throughout the Americas and southern Europe. In the pantheon of Latino literary giants, hindsight might paint him as successor to the likes of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes and Paz, or Borges, but recognition of his gifts came grudgingly, with critics acknowledging his greatness only at the end of his life.

Upon his death at aged 50, the media, which had so determinedly ignored him, decided that he was highly fashionable. The English-speaking press, tardy converts to his gutter gospel, have been even more mellifluous in their praise. The hyperbole seems apt. Though his reputation will rest largely on the twin suns of his oeuvre, The Savage Detectives, winner of the prestigious Romulo Gallegos Prize, and his gargantuan posthumous masterpiece, 2666, Bolano has left behind a body of work quite stunning in its breadth.

Against such measure, Antwerp, written in 1980 but held back from publication until a year before the author’s death, is a relatively minor work. Running to less than 80 pages, it is his first effort at a novel. Yet its importance cannot be overstated. Ignacio Echevarria, Bolano’s literary executor, has called this the ‘big bang’ moment in the writer’s fictional universe, and Bolano himself said Antwerp was “the only novel that doesn’t embarrass me.”

Antwerp is a novel only in the loosest definition of the term, a collection of 56 prose-poem style fragments, scattershot morsels of detail, at times gorgeously lyrical, at others sparse as screenplay instructions, that seem initially to encourage confusion but which, in their hectic building, do eventually make a kind of sense. The cast in what is essentially an unsolvable murder mystery includes first and third-person narrators, a voyeuristic hunchback, a corrupt cop, a violently abused young woman, an English writer and even a character named Roberto Bolano. What little plot there is unfolds only by suggestion. Yet even in this early venture, the qualities which mark out this author as special are already evident: vivid imagery, the tenseness of the prose, anger, the odd musicality of his sentences, the need to decimate boundaries. The experimental style takes him down a metafictional road, but the questions that would so dog him later on are already forming.

If taken for what it is, a collection of snapshots, hints and suggestions, instead of what it might be, Antwerp proves surprisingly pleasurable. Here, confusion proves a great and unexpected strength.