Most reviews of Antwerp are preoccupied with its status in the Bolaño canon. The first novel he ever wrote, decades before his semi-mythic betrayal of poetry in favour of prose, yet published posthumously, critics seem to want to see in it some clues about the labyrinthian work that was to come. Obviously, publishers don’t discourage this.
i enjoy the luxury of this being my first Bolaño. Of course, i knew a little of his reputation, first hearing about him via an episode of the Marxist Poetry Podcast discussing his one time collaborator Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, but only more recently realising his stature in contemporary ‘world literature’. i knew he had a reputation for difficulty, and for formal experimentation (my mouse has hovered more than once over the ‘buy now’ button for Nazi Literature in the Americas), and that combined with his communism made me very intrigued - but honestly? never high priority. i once found a copy of 2666 for £1 in a charity shop but ummed and ahhed. When i came back the next day it was gone. So when i found Antwerp at a decent mark down in a shop the other day, I didn’t miss my chance.
And i wasn’t disappointed. Antwerp is immensely readable and entirely incomprehensible by the same measures. It is very short, just 78 pages in my edition, composed of 56 chapters of only 1 or 2 pages each, and so more manageable an introduction than some of his other, infamously sprawling works. The descriptor ‘cinematic’ or ‘photographic’ suggests itself; the narrator(s) regularly invoke photos, videos, cameras, characters aware they are on film. And much like looking at a series of photographs, a clear narrative is not entirely obvious. At one point Bolaño writes, “Tell that stupid Arnold Bennet that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels.” Instead we have a series of recurring scenes and characters, or at least, scenes and characters that resemble one another; trains, bars, a campground, a detective, a girl, a hunchback, and a writer named Roberto Bolaño.
The story non-told is a haunting one. We are told of murders on the campground, perhaps involving the Anti-Terrorist Brigade; these are the first of many bodies found, examined, photographed. We also watch bodies through keyholes; men and women, fucking, a clinical cynicism to the voice suggesting resentment or perhaps violence. There are policemen and detectives but Bolaño (the author) is uninterested in telling us the answers they find, even the answers they’re looking for. The result is a book that tracks the invasive gaze of criminal investigation as it moves through the working class districts of Barcelona and its outskirts, following but never sharing, never repeating the findings of the state. We are given suggestions of the lives lived under this gaze - chapter 19, for example, ‘ROMANCE NOVEL’ (I quote the chapter in full below; that’s how short many of them are):
I was silent for a moment and then I asked whether he really thought Roberto Bolaño had helped the hunchback just because years ago he was in love with a Mexican girl and the hunchback was Mexican too. Yes, said the guitarist, it sounds like a cheap romance novel, but I don’t know how else to explain it, I mean in those days Bolaño wasn’t overflowing with solidarity or desperation, two good reasons to help the Mexican. But nostalgia, on the other hand…
Help with what, we will never know. And the romance of nostalgia is, by the novel’s ending, denied to us - one of my favourite chapters is titled, ‘YOU CAN’T GO BACK’. Critics may wish to stay, awaken the dead, make whole the smashed and broken narrative fragments that lie before us, but Bolaño (the author) insists on piling up the debris ever higher, moving forward beyond the state, the nation, and its literary sentries.[1]
i can’t finish this review without saying; i am certain that the original ZAUM collective are Bolaño fans. The elegiac yet fragmented prose, its cynicism, the refusal of easy memory, and of course, the detectives, all point right to the influence of the novelist on Disco Elysium. It makes me wonder if it would be possible to make a game with the same level of experimental narrative, or narrative refusal, elliptic rather than progressive in nature. Possible, maybe, but it would probably have very little market appeal. Then again, both Bolaño and ZAUM seem to have been burnt by market appeal in the long run.
Anyway. i had a really good time with this, and even had to resist the urge to simply start it all over again from the beginning (i have too many books in my pile that im excited for rn for that indulgence). i suspect Bolaño will become a firm favourite of mine - but for now, this was a good a way as any to be introduced.
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[1] This sentence is riffing on Walter Benjamin’s famous passage on ‘the Angel of History’ in Theses on the Philosophy of History. [link]
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