Roberto Bolano's Antwerp: Book Review

“An urge, at the cost of nervous collapse in cheap rooms, propels poetry toward something detectives call perfection.” – Roberto Bolano, Antwerp

Roberto Bolano's Antwerp: Literary Shadow Puppeteer

by Armando Ortiz

Let me begin my discourse by talking about Roberto Bolano’s novelette, Antwerp. It’s a brief and compelling novel. In the story, a detective searches for a missing person, their role in the crime unclear. It also includes a woman that might be a prostitute, a vagrant or then again she might be a victim of a crime. In addition, the novelette includes a person that’s either a cop impersonator or quite possibly a dirty cop that is using his badge to exploit people. Lastly, there is a writer who is living a vagrant’s life or better put, the writer is poor. 

One of the recurring scenes found in this particular work are of people being in and around a campsite. There is a camp keeper, who is always watching television, and inside the camp people wash their clothes, do their cooking, and in one extended scene they set up a makeshift screen using a white blanket to watch a film. They mostly lurk behind trees or are walking around their tent which in turn gives the reader a sense of them being shadows. A gruesome discovery is made on a path leading to the campsite, and no one seems to know what’s happened. Everything is a mystery to the reader and to the characters. The work also shifts scenes alternating with a seaside town during its winter season, so people are few. Another setting is of his characters walking up the stairs or closing doors, and in essence closing the doors to the world. It’s in their rooms where they become themselves.

All these characters seem to be in search of something. Whatever that is, it’s at hands reach, yet far enough to be unreachable. It's as if the characters in the story were aware that they are dreaming but cannot find a way to wake themselves up. The reader suddenly becomes a cast away with the characters in an ocean of uncertainty, and we wait for help to come. The story setting, to me, is very postmodern. This is due to the barren and somewhat lifeless landscape that he describes, yet the elements of nature are there, present. It’s a stark contrast to the energy of a bustling cosmopolitan city. Hashima Island a.k.a. Battleship City, is an abandoned Island that was used for mining, and once housed as many as five thousand people. It reminds us of the extremes we sometimes go to exploit the earth, and our own people, and then leave them abandoned and forgotten like many towns in the American Rust Belt. 

Bolano tells a story that revolves around the overlooked people of society, those of whom everyone’s turned a blind eye -the forgotten ones. Since, no one really pays attention to them; the detective spends more time suspecting strangers and distant shadows than actual suspects. People, if you can call them that, in both books are out living and surviving in an environment that seems metaphorically post-apocalyptic, but that quite possibly represents the fringe and marginalized of every society. It is a reflection of those whose life and death is at play every second of their life. At times I got the feeling that I was looking at a photo album, a collection of slides that had been abandoned in an alley dumpster.

Antwerp is a very illusive piece of work. It’s like being in a dream or watching a mystery film. There are moments where one gets the feeling of being sedated and high on drugs. The characters are desperately searching for that elusive dragon, seeking the master key that will solve all the world's questions. It’s as if one is on the operating table and the anesthesia needle has already pierced the vein and the white liquid is about to enter the bloodstream. 

Bolano’s brief novel challenges Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as his characters survive the desolation without resorting to cannibalism, yet both authors metaphorically employ similar themes. In McCarthy’s novel, some characters hunt humans for nourishment and for pleasure. Scavengers walk around ready to pounce on anyone that’s weak and in plain view. Antwerp portrays a world of fringe characters who exploit each other, including the dirty cop preying on vulnerable women, without the backdrop of a nuclear winter. 

Bolano’s Antwerp reminded me of Jim Morrison’s book, The Lords and New Creatures. Morrison’s writings seem to naturally fit well with Bolano’s story.

Cinema derives not from painting, literature,

sculpture, theater, but from ancient popular

wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation

of an evolving history of shadows, a delight in

pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its

lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning

with Priests and sorcery, a summoning of phantoms.

with, at first, only slight aid off the mirror and

fire, men called up dark and secret visits from

regions in the buried mind. In these séances,

shades are spirits which ward off evil.

Literature, like cinema, has its roots in theater, oral tales, and what Morrison labeled “ancient popular wizardry.” Though Bolano’s is telling a story and Jim is describing the inner trappings of the ancient practice of show play, both works complement each other. Jim describes what Bolano, the storyteller, is doing- is a symbolic form of shadow puppetry. His literary voice becomes a light and with a combination of words he manages to create objects that come alive, which in turn project shadows in the corners and crevices of our mind. Jim specifically talks about the history of film and goes back to the days of shadow puppetry, and keeps going farther back in history all the way to the Shamans who told their stories around a bonfire. 

This eerie reality is also, in a sense, what Bolano conjures up by telling his story. He gets us, sits us around the fire he’s made, and begins his strange tale. 

Morrison tells the reader the following:

When men conceived buildings,

and closed themselves in chambers

first trees and caves.

(Windows work two ways,

mirrors one way.)

You never walk through mirrors

or swim through windows.

In Bolano’s piece, one of the characters thinks, “who was the first human being to look out a window?”  You find yourself looking through a peephole, and looking at things that ought to be private. The torture of a person is supposed to be anonymous and secret, yet he puts the reader there, in the middle of everything, and describes the scenery in rather pornographic and violent detail. The reader becomes a wall in one of his scenes, an insect, a book- an accomplice. We become peeping toms. The peeping tom only looks and observes, just like we all do when we look at ourselves in the mirror or peer through the windows to see if it will rain.

Cinema has evolved in two paths.

One spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its

goal is the creation of a total substitute

sensory world.

The other is peep show, which claims for its

realm both the erotic and the untampered obser-

vance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or

voyeur's window without need of color, noise,

grandeur.

Bolano has a cinematic effect that is hard to describe, it seems that his frugal use of words works wonders, and conjures up images in every reader. As if his writing has a preternatural energy, which makes such a short story worth reading. One will not be disappointed and the images and thoughts it brings forth from the mind will have the reader making connections with things that the mind has seen, heard of and experienced in life.