Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño: Close-Ups Without Intimacy
Reading Note: Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño
This essay discusses the book in full, including its ending.
A train runs along the edge of a forest in Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp. Inside, a passenger looks through the window; deeper among the trees, a hunchback opens a can of food. The narration moves between them, briefly resumes the passenger’s movements, and finishes with the man in the woods:
“The hunchback holds a can of sardines in tomato sauce in his left hand. He’s eating. His eyes scan the foliage. He hears the train go by.”
That last sound joins two positions from which the train can be experienced. The passenger has watched the forest pass; the hunchback hears the vehicle from his place among the trees. Between them, Bolaño has supplied unusually clear geography: a highway borders the woods on one side, railway tracks on the other, with fields, a polluted river and the sea beyond. We can place the two men near each other even as their acquaintance, if any, remains unexplained. The train makes their proximity audible.
This is one of the particular pleasures of Antwerp, a short sequence of prose fragments populated by policemen, seasonal workers, lovers, foreigners and a writer who sometimes bears Bolaño’s name. Connections take shape through sound, framing and returning images while the information needed to know these people keeps slipping away. A place may become sharply visible before we can establish whose memory it belongs to. Someone’s body comes into close-up while the voice describing it loses confidence in the person’s identity.
The train passage also gives the fragmentation a local discipline. Its movement into the woods prepares an ending that can be heard from there. Calling the book cinematic begins to mean something exact when we follow such a join: narration changes position, and a shared sound carries the scene across the change. Enough of the world holds together for the gaps in human knowledge to become palpable.
A soundtrack withheld
Cinema has physical equipment in this book. In “The Sheet,” a man stretches cloth between pine trees, ties down its corners, tests the tension with his finger and announces that he will show a film. As he works, the sheet conceals most of his body from the hunchback watching him. The surface being prepared for visibility already obstructs a view. Later, spectators sit beneath the pines watching a projected adventure, slapping at mosquitoes while the language of pursuit circulates between the movie and the campground.
The vocabulary of cameras and screens consequently belongs to the inhabited world of Antwerp. It can also organize our access to a scene. In “They Talk but Their Words Don’t Register,” a woman enters an apartment where a man smiles at her. Her arrival is broken into small observable actions: pressing an elevator button, selecting a floor, glancing at herself in the mirror. Then the narration admits an absent channel of information:
“They talk but their words don't register on the soundtrack.”
The next sentence guesses at the conversation: an ordinary exchange about the day, tiredness, food and a beer. That guess supplies the domestic familiarity the missing voices cannot supply. Its certainty depends on a script of couplehood that the observer brings to the image.
As the two lie together, the camera pulls away and then moves closer. The account gives us a gentle hand, an entwined posture, a face between pillow and neck; it also calls the man a bastard. Tenderness and distrust occupy the same view, without a history that would settle their relation. When the camera finally approaches the faces, their impassivity excludes the observer. Greater visual proximity has reached the limit of what it can disclose about the lovers.
Beside the train’s audible connection, this missing soundtrack marks a different capacity of the cinematic prose. A sound can situate people together; its omission can leave the observer improvising what their intimacy consists of. The camera continues to move with an assurance the interpretation cannot share.
The beach keeps changing
The waiters walking on a deserted beach recur across the book. Their first appearance is already uncertain: a voice sees summer workers at eight in the evening and hesitates over whether their slow movements are real. We begin with an image and an observer’s doubt about it. By the compressed chapter “Synopsis. The Wind,” the group has a destination: five or six waiters are returning to a hotel. Its final sentence reads:
“The wind whips up sand and buries them.”
The sand carries a threat into a routine journey back from work. The verb briefly makes the workers’ disappearance sound terminal, although the passage establishes no deaths. Their bodies are being lost to view. Because the sentence ends the synopsis, the disappearance also interrupts its attempt to gather the book’s scattered people into an account.
Much later, in “La Pava Roadside Bar of Castelldefels,” a speaker remembers talking on the telephone for more than an hour after the other person had hung up. A voice has continued beyond its listener. The scene then breaks apart geometrically, and a beach appears: orange clouds, five distant figures walking away from the observer.
“The wind lifts a curtain of sand and covers them.”
Here the curtain makes the interruption of sight more explicit. The figures’ identity is less secure: they are five people, without the earlier occupational label. Recognition comes from their arrangement, the beach, the wind and the covering sand. The image can return recognizably while its inhabitants remain uncertain. A resemblance that the reader can trace across chapters outruns what the observer can tell us about the people within it.
Bolaño also brings the making of the image into view. “People Walking Away” recalls writing about the waiters and the windswept sand. In “Summer,” the writer becomes a waiter watching himself filming as he walks back toward the hotel. The worker, recorder and recorded figure occupy the same construction. Identifying the person behind an image grows harder when that person can also be writing or watching it.
Then “Monty Alexander” returns to the waiters moving away from the eye, with soft curtains of sand lifting in the wind. The closing sentence changes the image’s direction without completing another journey:
“From here, it looks like they'll try to come back.”
The sentence locates the observer, qualifies the appearance and projects an attempt into the future. Each part matters. Earlier, the group was returning to a hotel; now a possible return is imagined from the place where someone watches. We have no arrival to confirm it. The remembered image has acquired an expectation, and the prose leaves us at the distance from which that expectation can still be entertained.
What a fragment can finish
These suspended connections coexist with passages that carry a small narrative through to a consequence. In “Among the Horses,” love makes a writer’s modest arrangement at a riding school insufficient. Marriage would require a larger room, dependable income and papers in order. For the immediate trip to his fiancée, four magazine articles might pay the fare and a cheap hotel. He tells her he is coming, then fails to finish even one article. The journey disappears from his future while his work among the horses continues.
The sequence is pitilessly legible. One practical requirement generates the next, and the writing failure finally prevents an action that has already been promised. The surrounding fragments may destabilize a writer’s identity, but here a writer’s incapacity has a specific cost to the planned life together. The short span makes a life’s contraction perceptible through the loss of one feasible trip.
At the Mérida station, a narrator keeps watch over his sleeping girlfriend with a knife in his pocket. Across the room lies a homeless man whose appearance feeds his suspicion. Phrases shine before him like an electronic ticker, competing with the breathing, clock and distant train whistle. The man eventually offers cognac. A few minutes of conversation give way to a silence they share until morning. A gesture has changed the social meaning of the waiting room within the length of a fragment.
Such passages give the book’s ambiguities a useful measure. We encounter what Bolaño can accomplish when an image belongs to a sequence of actions with consequences. A 2010 MAKE review describes a tension between communal narrative and an observer’s lyric sensibility, finding both attraction and anticlimax in their interference. The beach passages give that tension a precise form: the arrangement of the workers survives across the book, while their destination and the observer’s relation to them change. Their recurrence accumulates feeling while only some of the scenes develop through to an outcome.
I wouldn’t call Antwerp a novel, though Bolaño uses that word in his foreword. Its continuity is predominantly the continuity of images being recalled, reworked and watched again. My preference for the poetry inside his more sustained novels, even as poetry, survives this book: the failed trip and the offered cognac suggest the force an image gains when someone must live through what follows it. Antwerp repeatedly releases an image before that following life becomes available. The release makes the writing beautiful and leaves part of its human force unrealized.
The waiters can therefore remain familiar after their destination has become uncertain. On returning to that beach, we remember people whom we still cannot securely identify, and watch from a position the prose has finally made explicit. After all those returns of the image, their next movement is still somebody’s guess.
Sources
Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp, translated by Natasha Wimmer (New Directions, 2010). Close readings refer to sections 2–3, 11, 15, 18, 20, 36, 41, 48, 50, 52 and 54–55.
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