Antwerp

As Bola o 's friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarr a, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bola o 's fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bola o 's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard which Bola o chose to publish in 2002, twenty 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. Antwerp 's fractured narration in 54 sections voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from Roberto Bola o all speak moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.