Amulet (Audible Audio Edition) Roberto Bolaño, Adriana Sananes, Chris Andrews - translator, Audible Studios Books
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A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America.
Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolaño's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women the melancholic young philosopher Elena; the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo; and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book An army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the '70s, and the last words of the novel are "And that song is our amulet."
Amulet (Audible Audio Edition) Roberto Bolaño, Adriana Sananes, Chris Andrews - translator, Audible Studios Books
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Amulet (Audible Audio Edition) Roberto Bolaño, Adriana Sananes, Chris Andrews - translator, Audible Studios Books Reviews
It is a monologue narrated by a female. How hard would it be for a male writer to write as a female protagonist in first person. It is hard to put the book down when the writer is Bolaño.
I heard a lot of great things about Bolano. I don't have that character on my keyboard for the 'n'. Anyway, I heard a lot of great things but frankly I was disappointed. Granted this was his only book I've read. I heard this was a good one to start with. I found it very predictable though and not very interesting. It's not poorly written so that's why I gave it 3 stars. It's just not very interesting or thought-provoking if you've explored much of anything beyond the basics.
If you have not read any Bolano, read this. If you like Bolano, read this. If you don't like Bolano, read this anyway. It's a short, decent book. Read it.
am always amazed by the way Bolano spins his thoughtful webs of ghosts and delusion. i will forever read bolano
Great book by a significant Chilean author
I am a great fan of Bolano and this book did not disappoint. I have read all of his novels and have moved on to reading his short stories now. Such a shame this author passed on at such an early age.
I picked up Amulet for two reasons. First, Roberto Bolano is the "it" boy of Latin American novelists at the moment - critics and the literary fashionistas are climbing all over The Savage Detectives and 2666. Second the massacre at Tlateloco, which is what this book is about, is a shameful, neglected event in Mexican history.
Tlateloco first. In 1968, many thinking Mexicans were pushing the PRI, the ruling party in a one party country, to become more open and democratic. Some specific demands were the repeal of an article in the penal code that allowed people to be locked up for "crimes of opinion;" the freeing of certain political prisoners; the removal of Mexico City's police chief. On October 2, 1968, students from the Autonomous University and elsewhere gathered for a meeting in Mexico City at the Plaza de Tlateloco. The army surrounded the plaza and opened fire. By the best estimates, over 300 people were killed and thousands more injured and arrested. Even by the harsh standards of Latin American politics, it was a massively brutal response, one that went largely unnoticed outside of Latin America in that turbulent year.
Amulet is a book that wants to bear witness. The story is told by Auxilio Lacoutre, an eccentric Uruguayan who fancies herself as the "mother of Mexican poetry" for the disinterested love and attention she showers on Mexico City's aspiring poets, including one Arturo Belano, a stand-in for the author. Auxilio becomes a heroine, at least in her own mind, because in 1968 she was holed up for almost two weeks in a ladies room at the Autonomous University while it was under siege by the police and the army. What she saw she can't confront, not directly, and the book captures the long, sideways slide of her consciousness as she tries to assemble a life after the carnage she's witnessed. A large part of Bolano's accomplishment in Amulet is to take a life that in a certain light would look random, chaotic and self-indulgent and make it seem, in its own small way, heroic.
Part of Bolano's appeal is that he defies easy categorization. He's not a realist, and he pointedly disavowed magical realism, calling it a literary and philosophical dead end. He writes about mundane, gritty things with fierce particularity, but then veers off into allegory, myth and symbolism, imposing his poetic mindset, especially his professed love of French symbolist poetry, into his novels. His prose brings to mind those hyperrealist paintings of diners and other mundane objects. These are diners where sunlight zings off airbrushed chrome and sparkling windows gleam maniacally. It's a diner, all right, but not like any diner you ever actually saw.
I'm surprised that no one talks about the debt Bolano owes Jack Kerouac the same headlong, self-referential style, the same chronicling of a literary band of brothers, the same insistence that the literary middle finger can hold off brutish, life-denying authoritarianism. The difference is that Bolano is also grappling with how individuals respond to the brutal and erratic political systems of Latin America. No one was lining up Kerouac and the Beats to shoot them, or tossing them in prison to torture them. After witnessing the massacre at Tlateloco, Auxilio becomes restless, emotionally numb, unable to fully inhabit the present. She's a soldier in the cultural wars who's undergoing post-traumatic stress.
Bolano - in this he reminds me of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman - seems to be saying that without art we can't make it through, but art itself cannot overcome jack-booted political power. It is this tension between affirmation and negation, and the sparks thrown off by his jittery, glittering prose, that make Bolano such a compelling novelist.
AMULET is different, confusing, and disconcerting . . . and quite haunting. Although it probably is most readily classified as a novel, it does not easily wear that label. AMULET is a first-person narrative, but there is no real plot. Instead, what the narrator -- Auxilio Lacouture, a woman poet originally from Uruguay but now in Mexico City (and a character in another of Bolano's works) -- relates is more of a memoir of her years as a kind of groupie in the vibrant literary world of Mexico City in the mid-1960s to late-1970s. But this "memoir" is not chronological or linear, and it continually veers between the impressionistic and the realistic. Rather than "memoir", maybe it is better thought of as an all-night oral account (and accounting) of her "literary life" delivered by Auxilio to a small group of fringe literati in a cheap and shabby university apartment.
The central event in Auxilio's story is the police crackdown on the student movement and occupation of the National Autonomous Mexican University in September 1968. While the riot police cleared the campus of students and dissidents (an actual historical event, with fatalities) Auxilio cowered in the women's room on the fourth floor of the Philosophy and Literature building. Again and again Auxilio returns to this event, with evident uneasiness about having hid out in a bathroom stall.
Auxilio fancies herself the "mother of Mexican poets," and during the course of her bohemian life in Mexico City she has come into contact (or claims to) with a number of Latin literary figures and artists, including "Arturo Belano" (an obvious alter ego for the author Roberto Bolano, an alter ego who has appeared in other of Bolano's works). Other actual historical figures of Latin American arts who make an appearance in Auxilio's story include Leon Felipe, Pedro Garfias, Remedios Varo, Lilian Serpas, Carlos Coffeen Serpas, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
Auxilio's account of her life in Mexico City is almost surreal -- a conflation or confusion of memories and time, as if she and everyone else is addled by psychotropic drugs, alcohol, or poverty and hunger -- or is it all a dream? Is this confusion something universal, or is it peculiar to Latin America, or peculiar to Bolano?
The "amulet" of the title appears at the end of the book in connection with a vision, or dream (again, there is confusion), which involves "a mass of children" or "young people" who were the "prettiest children of Latin America, the ill-fed and the well-fed children, those who had everything and those who had nothing," all of whom are "walking unstoppably toward the abyss." Don't worry, I have not fully revealed the ending or fully described the amulet. Indeed, the entire book might be regarded as an amulet in juxtaposition to the political and social violence that swept and upset much of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
AMULET is the second of Bolano's works that I have read. The first was "Last Evenings on Earth," a collection of short stories, which was intriguing and good, but not on the same plane as AMULET. But I still haven't come to even a tentative conclusion as to whether Bolano is a great writer, worthy of all the recent hype and buzz. I will have to read more of his work, but I can say that after having read AMULET, I now look forward to doing so.
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