Amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites of the Costa Brava, someone has gone missing. A detective sets out to find them. They search among the hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen that populate this dream world – but every door opens onto a nightmare. An experimental novella, spliced together in vignettes, Antwerp is Roberto Bolaño’s first work of fiction. A personal declaration of the power of literature, to read it is to be present at ‘the big bang’ of Bolaño’s enterprise into prose, to see the...