Roberto Bolaño

Amulet

Prashanth Srivatsa

Amulet is a ghostwalk on the dry streets and bars of Mexico City, at times real, at times a hallucination or prophecy. The narrator, an illegal migrant, is holed up in the toilet of a University for 13 days while the Army takes violent control of the college. In her strange seclusion, she reminisces both the past and the future, conjuring vivid characters, ideas and thoughts that serve as the backdrop for the violence. Bolano's words are magical, his tone something between a dream and a song, but there's disparity between the massacre and the bohemian & lonely memories of life preceding it.

It is September 1968 and the Mexican student movement is about to run head-on into the repressive right-wing government of Mexico. When the army invades the university, one woman hides in a fourth-floor ladies' room and for twelve days she is the only person left on campus. Staring at the floor, she recounts her bohemian life.

Donald

Reading this novella today made me realize two things: 1) Bolaño is one of the reasons I decided to study classics. 2) The poets and artists in his novels are amazing to read about, but I avoid people like that in real life. I cannot stand intoxicated young men, even for short periods of time.

This is a 'minor' Bolaño work for sure, but it's fantastic and haunting. One of the remarkable things about Bolaño is that all of his books, even his poetry, fit together to make one giant work. 'Amulet' is another piece in the puzzle, and it's a satisfying piece.

Lina.

Bozana Radenkovic

Gustav Vallin

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 Bolano'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 (Bolano'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

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