Amberes

Described by the author himself as "a crime novel, although it may not seem like one," Amberes was written twenty-two years before its first publication in 2002, and reveals the most experimental and complex Roberto Bolaño.

Straddling narrative and poetic prose, Amberes is composed of 56 fragments, 56 stray bullets whose target remains hidden from the reader. Like small flashes of light, without order or concert, that only hint at the existence of a more blinding light, the memories and musings that, in the voices of different characters—living and dead—fill these pages, tell us of hunchbacks, drugs, prostitutes, films, speechless writers, murders, murderers, and the murdered.

Wavering between fiction and reality, between sanity and madness, the reader faces a case on a board with all the pieces, but with no guarantee that it has a solution.

Reviews:
"Almost all writers believe they are, or want to be, like Roberto Bolaño: innovative and daring in style, seductive in narration, and capable of being read and reread; in other words, exceptional."
Scott Bryan Wilson, The Quarterly Conversation

"One of the most respected and influential authors of his generation. Equally entertaining, subtle, penetrating, and terrifying."
John Banville

"The most influential and admired Spanish-language novelist of his generation."
Susan Sontag