Amulet [Paperback]

Roberto Bolaño (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2008

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."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bolaño's work fugues again and again around the confluence of fugitive literary movements and tumultuous political upheavals of '60s and '70s Mexico and Chile. Originally from Montevideo, poet Auxilio Lacouture cleans house in Mexico City for two well-known poets and hangs about the university literary scene doing odd jobs. In September 18, 1968, as the army occupies the campus, arresting and killing people, Auxilio is in the deserted bathroom stalls, obliviously reading poetry; later she becomes famous for being the only one who resists arrest that fateful day. Over years without fixed address or employment, she loses her teeth and befriends the teenage Arturo Belano. Belano eventually returns to Chile at the time of the Allende coup and is imprisoned by Pinochet—a political initiation author Bolaño experienced himself. Auxilio's first-person narration serves as a medium for lost young voices of revolution, such as the elusive, limping Elena, the Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, who claims she slept with Che Guevara. Auxilio's lyrical prophecies converge in a wrenching tribute to all the voices she has known, tinged with Bolaño's luminous pathos. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Good, as good as they reported in the New York Times and The New York Review of Books. (Ralph: Review of Arts, Lit, Philosophy, and the Humanities , Carlos Amantea)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (May 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811217469
• ISBN-13: 978-0811217460
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #505,185 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed "by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times)," and as "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50. Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his Bolaño translations.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Very memorable -- almost too memorable January 5, 2008

By James Elkins

Format:Hardcover

This book really stays in your mind! I hadn't thought I would write a review, because Bolano is the Latin American author du jour in North America. But this novel has genuine staying power. The central image -- a woman cowering in the women's room on the fourth floor of the Philosophy and Literature building in UNAM in Mexico City during the police incursion -- is itself very memorable, but really it's her inner monologues, dreams, and hallucinations, and the strange sinuous voice that connects everything into a single book, that stays with me.

One of the more acute reviews of Bolano recently was, I think, in the "London Review of Books"; the reviewer noted thaqt Bolano writes continuously about writing, and that his novels chronicle novelists and poets, but that somehow his books aren't exactly novels. The authorial voice, and in this case also the narrator's voice, are presented as if they are talking. It's as if this is what happens in a writer's mind when he or she is contemplating the craft and social world of novel writing, before it's time to settle down and actually write. I think that's an excellent insight, and it explains an odd effect in Bolano: when you encounter a passage that is beautifully written, it seems somehow out of place, as if that is something that should only happen in the novels that Bolano's characters are forever discussing. Or to put it another way: it is as if novel writing is no longer possible, and the only way forward for the novel is rumination about the novel.

Wonderful book. I dare you to forget it.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars haunting short novel, hard to shake May 12, 2007

By huetenan

Format:Hardcover

A haunting hallucinatory story. The central event is hinted at but never directly mentioned, as far as I remember: namely, the cold-blooded murder of its own students by the Mexican state in 1968. This unsolved crime poisons and pollutes the very structure of the time and space that the heroine wanders like a ghost. She lives for poetry but there doesn't seem to be a poem that can cope with the violence she unwillingly experienced and survived. Her prophecies and dreams finally say what ordinary language can't.

Sounds too arty? No, it's lively and readable. The whole thing is held together and made compelling by the heroine's unique voice. You won't want to stop listening to her, even at her most confused. I suspect that this will be a classic that our great grandchildren will be reading and puzzling over too.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The work of a great author? May 20, 2008

By R. M. Peterson TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.