{"id":3614,"date":"2010-04-23T00:05:16","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T04:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=3614"},"modified":"2016-06-09T15:50:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T19:50:00","slug":"roberto-bolano-antwerp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2010\/04\/23\/roberto-bolano-antwerp\/","title":{"rendered":"Roberto Bola\u00f1o: Antwerp<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Antwerp<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Roberto Bola\u00f1o (Amberes<\/em>, 2002)<\/span>\r\ntranslated\u00a0from the Spanish by Natasha\u00a0Wimmer (2010)<\/span>\r\nNew Direction (2010)<\/span>\r\n78 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
Most of Bola\u00f1o’s New Directions book covers are similar in style. I’ve liked them. However, because Antwerp<\/em>\u00a0looked so different, I’ve been more excited to read it. It arrived in a coverless hardback, small-sized and well designed, simple and bold. It suggests weight.<\/p>\n
\"Review<\/a><\/p>\n
Still, despite the cover, I wasn’t sure the content would hold up. I always have doubts when I approach Bola\u00f1o, like I’ll realize what many suspect: that there’s nothing there. Perhaps this feeling is some vestige\u00a0from my initial experience with the Chilean when I read 2666<\/em>. I loved the book while reading it, but I was so frustrated at the end. Now I think my feelings would be different. I’ve come to realize that much of reading Bola\u00f1o is the experience of reading itself, the search for meaning, the disturbing images, the powerful prose. Antwerp <\/em>exceeded my expectations.<\/p>\n
The book is divided into 56 fragments, each a paragraph that spans a page or two.\u00a0 They begin with a statement many might attribute to Bola\u00f1o’s work itself:<\/p>\n
1. FA\u00c7ADE<\/span><\/p>\n
Once photographed, life here is ended.\u00a0It is almost symbolic of Hollywood.\u00a0Tara has no rooms inside.\u00a0It was just a fa\u00e7ade.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
These fragments, at first, drift from one subject to another with no\u00a0apparent link, though if you’ve read Bola\u00f1o the characters might sound familiar: there’s the corrupt and\u00a0brutal\u00a0policeman, the prostitute, the poet. Part of the enjoyment in reading\u00a0Antwerp <\/em>is allowing these lives to just happen in front of you, to just accept that you will not understand everything for a while, but that the\u00a0experience itself is worth its time. And what does that initial fragment say about the fragments that follow?<\/p>\n
I’d like to quote in full one of the first passages that really grabbed my attention:<\/p>\n
11. AMONG THE HORSES<\/span><\/p>\n
I dreamed of a woman with no mouth, says the man in bed. I couldn’t help smiling. The piston forces the images up again. Look, he tells her, I know another story that’s just as sad.\u00a0He’s a writer who lives on the edge of town. He makes a living working a riding school.\u00a0He’s never asked for much, all he needs is a room and time to read.\u00a0But one day he meets a girl who lives in another city and he falls in love. They decide to get married. The girl will come to live with him.\u00a0The first problem arises: finding a place big enough for the two of them. The second problem is where to get the money to pay for it.\u00a0Then one thing leads to another: a job with a steady income (at the stables he works on commission, plus room, board, and a small monthly stipend), getting his papers in order, registering with social security, etc. But for now, he needs money to get to the city where his fiance\u00e9 lives. A friend suggests the possibility of writing articles for a magazine. He calculates that the first four would pay for the bus trip there and back and maybe a few days at a cheap hotel. He writes his girlfriend to tell her he’s coming.\u00a0But he can’t finish a single article.\u00a0He spends the evenings sitting outdoors at the bar of the riding school where he works, trying to write, but he can’t. Nothing comes out, as they say in common parlance.\u00a0The man realizes that he’s finished.\u00a0All he writes are short crime stories. The trip recedes from his future, is lost, and he remains listless, inert, going automatically about his work among the horses.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I know the basic concept here — a man who cannot escape his circumstances — is not original. But in Bola\u00f1o’s universe, this writer of crime stories comes up again and again, both antic and listless at the same time. This passage also begins to tie the book together — er, at least, tie it together a bit more. The riding school comes up several times and we start to see how the various characters fill the space around it.\u00a0We find out who is dreaming of women with no mouths and whom he’s talking to here. We get a sense of the community: “Nothing shocking, really, people upset because they were out of work, etc.\u00a0These are the sad stories I have to tell you.”<\/p>\n
While the characterization was fine, I found that I valued other aspects of the book.\u00a0I liked the fragmented quality. I liked that it was at least somewhat self-conscious: “Our stories are sad, sergeant, there’s no point trying to understand them.”\u00a0Again, I really didn’t fret this time when I couldn’t put the pieces together.\u00a0Perhaps it is because the book is set up in fragments that made me care less about structure. It reminded me strongly of a poem, lonely and longing and hopeless, which the following passage reinforces:<\/p>\n
36.\u00a0 PEOPLE WALKING AWAY<\/span><\/p>\n
Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of children tumble into the void.\u00a0I wrote: “a group of waiters returning to work” and “windswept sand” and “the dirty windowpanes of September.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s Antwerp<\/em>, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,13],"tags":[880,916,579],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-3614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-roberto-bolano","tag-2000s","tag-916","tag-spanish"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/Antwerp.jpg?fit=340%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-Wi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3614"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18580,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3614\/revisions\/18580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3614"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}