Roberto Bolaño

Auxilio Lacouture is trapped.

For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of her university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale: she is the Mother of Mexican poetry.

A highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory novella, Amulet is a potent stream of consciousness through which the poets of Mexico rage and swirl. Filled with wild, dark literary prophecies, heroic poets, mad poets, artists ‘choked by the brilliance of youth’, Auxilio’s passionate narration – both heartbreaking and lyrical – is suffused with the essence of Roberto Bolaño’s art.

Amulet

A fever dream, to give the current parlance currency. I like Bolaño, but this almost stream-of-unconsciousness that had at its core the massacre of students in Tlatelolco Square in 1968, was hard work. That’s not taking anything away from the writer (or the translator -Chris Andrews - who deserves a lot of credit). But the central motif - the alienation, horror, and acceptance of an environment (be it politically motivated or self-imposed) was mixed in with the cyclone of the narrators recounting of the contents history in poets, and futures imagined by literary greats. The final scene, in which we were given a view - quite literally - of the abyss, was very moving. A disquieting recounting, and one that despite my struggles with its delivery, I shall retain. 

Jan Jackson

Jamieson

"And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure. And that song is our amulet."


The writing for this book is absolutely beautiful, that is honestly the top thing that sticks with me. The whole book is so beautifully written I wish I spoke Spanish to read it in its original form.

I'm so glad I read this twice because it was much easier to understand the second time once I had more of a picture of the overall story. 

Amulet follows a Uruguayan woman named Auxilio who refers to herself as the mother of mexican poetry and living a bohemian lifestyle in Mexico among young poets she has befriended. 

The story centres around Auxilio, who she becomes trapped inside a toilet in the Mexico City university after the riot police come to remove the students and professors. This is based on a true incident. Alone in the toilet for 13 days, she begins reading a book of Mexican poetry she had with her and thinking about the state of modern literature and latinx literature, as well as how this connects to the history and present state of Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The author is Chilean but spent a lot of time living throughout Latin America and I really thought it was interesting how he also wrote himself into the story. 

This is such an interesting and unique read, and honestly I am really loving reading more literary fiction thanks to University. I'm going to have to try and keep it up even when it's not required reading.


  “Still I kept walking. I walked and walked. And from time to time I stopped and said to myself: Wake up, Auxilio. Nobody can endure this. And yet I knew I could endure it. So I baptized my right leg Willpower and my left leg Necessity. And I endured.”

Amulet

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