Customer Reviews

Amulet

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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.

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.

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.

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, a continuation of a character from the Savage Detectives, has a very misleading plot description. It talks about the main character being trapped in the bathroom during a siege (in a sadly overlooked event) on a Mexican school. However, that only makes up a small portion of the novel. Most of the novel involves her traveling the dangerous streets of Mexico with various people, many of which appear in the Savage Detectives.

This is a very beautifully written novel, with fully realized atmosphere and tight focus on the plot. You really feel for the characters and the situations they're in, and the last few pages are some of the most beautifully written in all of literature. Highly recommended.

Maybe I should temper the title by stating I've only read 2666 and Last Evenings on Earth, so I can't definitely say he's written more beautiful pages elsewhere. But from section 12 onwards are some of the most haunting and evocative pages I've ever read. This is Bolano taking his full talent and distilling it into a novella that features no diversions, tangents, or lulls like you find in 2666.

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.

If Bolano's colossal 2666 is the song of the choir of all mankind, then Amulet is a solitary voice rising from the dark. And it is a flawless voice.

His style is unique in its mood and clarity.To read him for the first time is to find gold.
-Jule Laudisio

I'd never read Roberto Bolano before. I will again. I just finished Amulet and was struck by a number of things. First, I wanted to talk about it with people who'd read it, so reading the Amazon reviews was the next best thing. The reviews here are excellent, and oddly do not mention some of the things that struck me.

Second, the review excerpted on the back from John Banville, Guardian, says "His work is the crossroads where Marquez meets Burroughs and Borges meets Mailer, resulting in a riotous dust-up." I don't know about the "riotous dust-up" part, but the mixing and meeting of authors is there, and it's a theme throughout the book. My jaw rather dropped when I read his reference to Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr.-- I would throw Alice into the mix of what is going on here. There's poetry and psychology. There's writing about writers more than about writing per se. There's madness. And yet, I dare you to put it down.

Third, hmmm. Bolano is a man using a woman as his first person narrator (she constitutes most of the story herself), something that doesn't always work. I'm reminded that when I hear a singer and can't tell if it's a man or a woman, it's always a man. Auxilio Lacouture is a drifting, not terribly intelligent woman. A woman who is streetwise, brave, and capable of much love. She is believable. The poetry of the book, her musings and hallucinations, are beautiful and moving. The images that arise and dissipate are striking. If you haven't already, read this book.