Amulet

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.

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.

Great book by a significant Chilean author

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

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.

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.

"This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won't appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won't seem like that. Although, in fact, it's the story of a terrible crime."Robert Bolano's Amulet starts on this curiously ominous note. A recollection of Latin American history, its literature, and its people in the violent and turbulent decades between 1960 and 1980 could have been bitter and horrific and cynical, but it isn't. Auxilio Lacouture, the Uruguayan mother of all Mexican poetry, makes sure of it. Amulet is her song, the song of her life, of all lives that she encounters amidst the squalor and the struggle of Mexico City. It is the song of defiance - of a woman who spent 13 days without food, closeted in a toilet in UNAM, the only soul to remain there during the army's occupation of the university; of a people who refuse to bow down to the poverty​; of a generation which believed that things will only change if they take the initiative, even if it meant standing up to those who wielded the guns. It is the song of unimaginable tragedy; it is the song of unrelenting hope. And that song is our Amulet.

The English translation seems amateurish. I bought it to read with the Spanish. The translator makes subtle sentences very simplistic. And sometimes so reworked that the idea of the original is missed.

Amulet is poetic, such an intense book. Suggested by a friend I am glad that I read this.Do read if you haven't, its life changing!Happy Reading!

This is the fifth book of Bolano's that I have now read and as with the other four I absolutely loved it. If you have never read Bolano before you are in for a real treat, although I should warn you that this is probably the most surreal of his works. If you have read Bolano before you will know that incidents and characters pop up in more than one novel, indeed this book in itself is a kind of expansion of an incident in The Savage Detectives which was first published the year before this.If you don't know what happened in 1968 in Mexico City it is really not that important but to help you, there were demonstrations, protests, etc which led to over two hundred people being killed and a thousand being injured; this was only a short time before the Olympic Games that were held in that city that year (indeed these had their own problems when two black athletes made the Black Power sign; these were also the first Olympics to be held at such a high altitude above sea level and also the first where dope teating was first intoduced).We are introduced to Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan living in Mexico who is the self styled 'Mother of Mexican Poetry'. We don't really know what Auxilio does, we only have what she says, but it would seem that she is really some kind of groupie who hangs around the intelligentsia; we are given the impression that she cleans and does odd jobs for them and gets laid by them. When the army move into the university to clear it Auxilio finds herself in the toilets and manages to hide out there whilst the troubles are going on, drinking water from the tap and eating toilet paper. All she has with her is a book of Mexican poetry. With nothing to do Auxilio starts looking back on her life, both real events and others that she invents, and then re-invents. We are led on a hypnotic and surreal journey through the lives of the people she has met or has wished to, never really being sure of what is truth and what is fiction. This may sound a bit weird or off putting but let me assure you that it does work, Bolano pulls it off with some aplomb.There is as always a semi-autobiographical sense in this book, and indeed Arturo Belano is Roberto Bolano himself. We are given a glimpse into the lives of these poets from that time, and the interactions between them and Auxilio, finding out that a lot of them are actually immigrants like Auxilio who have either left willingly or been forced to flee their own countries due to political, reactionary reasons. This book takes in Greek myth, the infamous plane crash in the Andes where those who survived only did so due to cannibalism and Auxilio's predictions/ prophecies of who will re-emerge as literary luminaries in the future. As usual there is a strong literary theme to the whole novel, which although is short as usual packs in a lot more than you would expect.All in all this is a great little book and if you haven't read Bolano before will make you hanker for more, although I should warn you that we did Last Evenings on Earth at my local reading group and only one other person with myself absolutely loved it. Personally I love what the late great Bolano wrote and it definitely needs to be read by a wider audience, it is so easy to read and appeals to something deep inside you.

I hadn't read any Bolano before but after this I'll be reading everything he's ever written - this is the real thing. Fluent and engaging from page one, this is both beautifully-written and deeply melancholy. It melds beauty and sadness in a way that only the Latin Americans seem to be able to do and which they have decisively made their own.Mexico City, 1968 and when the Army invade a university, arresting students and professors alike, a woman hides in the bathroom and stays there for thirteen days recounting the story of her life amongst the Bohemian poets. Gradually we realise that her story is in her head and that it is her very narrative, flipping backwards and forwards in time, which is her lifeline, weaved to hold her to some kind of reality in the face of what she is experiencing. Without food, her imaginings get more hallucinatory, and yet her story is an alternative history of Latin American poetry. In her desperation she writes herself into this history, creating a self-fashioned life for herself that binds her to the real life she is experiencing.This might sound a bit esoteric (and it is) but Bolano pulls it off with panache: from the first sentences we know that we are in the hands of a literary master. He is mischievous and playful at times, but tragedy is always hovering just beyond the edge of our vision. And the final couple of pages are some of the most beautiful, tragic and moving that I have ever read. This is a very literary novel and story-telling is itself the amulet of the title, but I felt that it's also a very accessible and humane one. If, like me, you've been curious about all the fuss over Bolano but are not quite ready to leap into the massive 2666, this is the ideal place to start. Powerful and amazing.

Amulet is a beautifully written, poetic story of the dreams and hallucinations of Auxilio Lacouture as she is left hidden in the bathroom of Mexico University when the right wing army invade in September 1968, with only a book of poetry for company. She is the only one left on the site and her mind imagines a number of bohemian encounters with the poets and artists of Mexico City not only in the past and present day, but also in the future. At times she is aware that these are dreams but as time goes on, lack of food and fear make these more an more real to the narrator. It is deeply moving and Auxilio's voice is interesting and charming - with a nice touch of self awareness that makes it easy to empathise with her. What makes it so beautiful is that the language is both clever but also very grounded in the every day language of the struggles of the poor and artistic community in Latin America. Even before her shocking experience, she was always an outsider to the artistic community and she continues very much to be an observer. It is the artists who can concentrate of beauty while suffering and struggling that seems to speak to many Latin American writers (Bolano is Chilean) many of whose countries have suffered terrible political mismanagement.It has an unmistakably Latin American style - if, like me, you love the works of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, then you will undoubtedly enjoy this book - although it is a lot less complex than books like One Hundred Years of Solitude. But it shares the same dream like qualities, and a lack of coherent narrative - which is either beautiful or annoying depending on your point of view. It's also much shorter - and is more a novella than a full blown novel. Writing of dreams and hallucinations can so easily lose the reader, but this kept me enthralled partly because of the simple beauty of the language.It's a beautiful and moving book and I will certainly look out for other of the late writer's works. Highly recommended, particularly if you already enjoy the Latin American writing style or just beautiful poetic writing. But if you are a slave to plot, then this book isn't for you.EDIT: If you are interested in Spanish writing, check out  Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Novelists (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)  for some interesting names to watch out for. Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Novelists (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

Perhaps this is the wrong book to begin with for a Bolano newcomer such as myself: though short, its brevity is at the price of any trace of the epic vision Bolano is said to display in his other books. Nevertheless, I found it very disappointing. The book is a stream-of-consciousness tale of the bohemian scene of Mexico City in the 60s and 70s driven by an unreliable narrator. Unfortunately the unreliable narrator is not employed subtly, with the unreliability hitting you round the head, chiefly exhibited through obvious date mix-ups and failure to remember whether particular episodes even occurred. Furthermore, the book's structure is not 'complex', as one can imagine its devotees might proclaim, but rather non-existent: we dart in and out of different episodes with no masterplan at all. I certainly don't object to non-linearity but non-linear structures ought to serve a purpose to make a broader point, if a book is to be more than a series of musings. But my biggest problem with the book was simply that it didn't emotionally resonate with me at all and I couldn't empathise with the characters. The narrator, Auxilio, is conceited and has a highly annoying habit of speaking in quasi-Hegelian dialectic at times (perhaps intended as a product of her hanging around a Mexican philosophy department, as the story has it) -- saying one thing and then the precise opposite, rendering the faux-profound observations rather meaningless. There are nice turns of phrase here and there and the writing is fluent and almost poetic, which prevents the book from being actively unpleasant to read, but it is not so beautiful as to make the book engaging on its own (in the way that say, Kerouac, who one might see affinities with, can be). I ended up without a sense of what the book was trying to say, and the combination of this with plotlessness made it a frustrating read.

Amulet is a tale about a Uruguyan woman who attaches herself to a circle of Mexican poets in the 1960s. The writing is tinged with surrealism, the narrator is not `unreliable' in the conventional sense, but embodies the detachment, disruption and ineffability that seems to structure the whole work. The reader is forced to confront this from the very beginning of the book: "I came to Mexico City in 1967, or maybe it was 1965, or 1962. I've got no memory for dates anymore..." (2). It is clear from the outset that there will be no linear narrative. The book proceeds instead as the narrator meanders through a series of recollections told in a voice that resists narrative conventions of certainty and singularity. "A few days later, in January 1974, Arturito arrived from Chile and he was different. What I mean is that although he was the same Arturo, deep down something had changed or grown, or changed and grown at the same time. What I mean is that people, his friends, began to see him differently, although he was the same as ever." (76-77). This series of recollections is saturated with references to Latin American history and culture. Some, apparently, are real, others imagined. It also repeatedly refers back to itself, often in self-contradiction. The aesthetic is probably supposed to convey an "echo of nothingness" (184) which serves as a way of understanding the experience of the artistic underground in Mexico City in the 1960s and 70s. I know much too little about Mexico to be able to say how effective all of this is, but in itself, the book gives the reader very little to go on. It is clear that the book is concerned with the difficulty of conveying the strange combination of melancholy and violence that forms its subject matter. In this respect, it is likely to be asking too much of readers coming to the book in English translation.

I'm finding it difficult to sum up 'Amulet' for a satisfactory review, so I'll start with what I am sure about. At less than two hundred pages, Amulet is a short read - more novella than novel. The story, such as it is, rambles and meanders all over the place, often reading like a prose poem. Instead of a traditional narrative, the reader is treated to a series of linked vignettes, detailing a poet's life in Mexico City, during a time of great upheaval.Amulet is both allegorical and semi-autobiographical, and since I know little about Mexican history, and less about Bolano, I imagine many of the novel's nuances passed me by, yet Bolano's skill as a writer remains evident. His prose is economical and well pruned, but contains the most wonderful and evocative imagery. Despite the quality of Bolano's writing, I found that Amulet lacked substance. It felt unfinished - a first draft rather than a well honed final edit. I have a nagging suspicion, that had Bolano's magnum opus '2666' not been published to such acclaim, 'Amulet' may never have seen the light of day.This novel will not appeal to everyone, and many will find its fragmented structure and ethereal plot frustrating. That said, the entire novel is probably worth reading for the two final, breath-taking and beautiful, chapters. These are the work of a superior writer at the top of his game. If you like strong plot and narrative, then this novel is probably best avoided. If you are interested in the power of language, or you like your history with a poetic bent, then 'Amulet' might just be the novel for you.

I found this intriguing, but sadly it didn't ever quite grab me by the heart and guts. I loved the idea of this shape shifting/time shifting narration of a right wing backlash against students/intellectuals in Mexico in 1968. Did it happen? I don't know enough about Mexican politics to know if it did or didn't, but references to South American politics that I did know of, lead me to assume 'yes' but as the whole novel constantly hoiks the rug of our perceptions of reality from under our feet as time, truth, recollected memory, recollected memory from the point of a future which has not yet happened, weave in and out of each other, the question 'is this real' loses meaning anyway. Bolano chips away at the reader's certainties.Curiously, I felt the 'magic realism' could have gone a lot, lot further - Bolano engages in a more cerebral way with this, I prefer the much more visceral and colourful writing of Isabel Allende.For much of this book, I was convinced I was having a five star experience, but somehow it didn't quite seem to go anywhere, I had no real sense of the purpose - there was a lot of writing to get to'the song I heard was about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin American led to sacrifice.....................it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure'In the end, I just got a bit tired of the toothless narrator watching the moon shift across the tiles of the bathroom, yet again!

Having read and enjoyed 2666, I was looking forward to Amulet. But where the strength in 2666 was in building something that was greater than the sum of its parts, Amulet just felt like a part.Two weeks on, and Amulet seems to have been quite forgettable. There is an abiding memory of a woman trapped in a university toilet during a seige, apparently claiming associations with the great Mexican poets of the day. The scene in the toilet is in 1968, and some of the events referred to were later than 1968, but the text kept returning to the toilet. Was this, I wondered, a woman who could not escape from her memory of the siege? Was it a woman living during the siege and imagining the future? Was it a woman who hadn't actually survived the siege, lingering on as a ghost, haunting the toilet as the world carried on, having long forgotten the siege?Potentially bright and thought provoking, the novel suffered from introspection in the literati of modern Mexico. At times, the writing felt pretentious, at times it felt self conscious. It felt like a bit of an in-joke, But it never felt quite authentic.Amulet is much shorter than 2666, but it is also much less than 2666. If you want to read Bolano, go for the real thing, not Amulet.

...but not dazzling. I've never read Roberto Bolano before, and it's been a long time since I've read fiction like his. I loved Gabriel Garcia Marquez's and Isabel Allende's books when I first read them. I'd hoped Amulet would refresh that sense of wonder and the strong feeling of place that those books gave me, but alas, no.I'm not particularly knowledgeable or interested in Mexican history. This book may have given me some information about it, but the style is such that I'd have to check before I could be sure of any details. As it is, it hasn't made me any more interested. So this aspect of the book was lost on me. I had a little sympathy for Auxilio, whose imagination and mental state composes the narrative, but not very much, I'm afraid. Auxilio in the book is a shadow, though a shadow with personality and not without humour. But she did not draw me into her world, skimming as she seemed to be on the shallows of it herself.For all that, I can see the skill of Bolano's writing even if there was something lost in the translation, as some reviews have mentioned. At least, even if Amulet hasn't interested me in Mexican history, it has interested me in Bolano's fiction.

I really don't know where to begin with my review. I did not know of Roberto Bolano and came to this book with no pre conceived notions as to how it would be. Amulet is quite the most exciting novel I have read in ages. It breaks all the rules of conventional fiction in that the plot changes and is reinvented over and over again in the most beautifully crafted prose which seems to soar imaginatively swooping like the wind through Mexico City where the story unfolds.Chris Andrew's translation deserves a prize in itself for its poetic brilliance. The novel is in the first person; Auxilio Lacouture, the mother of Mexican poetry hides in the fourth floor bathroom of the university in Mexico City as the right wing government forces storm the building in 1968. She survives for 12 days as the sole occupant of the university and during this time, without food she tells her story both real and halucinatory.This work is breathtaking in its scope and magical in its use of language. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This is a translation from the Spanish. I have no idea how close the English version is to the original but it certainly reads well.There seems to be a very different writing style used by most modern mainland european writers. Most modeern French literature I have read seems to be a lot sparser than most books written in English. This book is similar in this respect. Whether that is because English has a far larger vocabulary or because the English language allows writers to do things other languanges do not I cannot say.I find the very sparse sentence construction used in this book to be fairly typical of the other modern European works I have read. I find this method of writing divorces from the emotional core of the story and the characters in it. I prefer to be verey involved with the story and the characters. Here, I find myself an observer.If you like the style, you'll like the book. This is definitely one to try before you buy. I certainly did not hate hate it but it is not on my "must read" list either. I should point out that quite a lot of highly acclaimed writing is not on my "must read" list either!

Amulet can be recommended as a manageable introduction to Roberto Bolanos work, at a fraction of the size of 2666, it shares much of the bigger novels overly literary style and plotless meandering and so can serve well to get a taste of Bolano.Being a big fan of Latin American literature, Bolanos novels seem to tick all the boxes, unfortunately this novel is even more inacessible than 2666, sharing the endless repition that Bolano seems to favor, its a real struggle to make it through to the end, and its even harder to care at all about the events and characters within.Overly literary and pretentious there is little flow to the book hindered by Bolanos stilted writing which comes across as forced and jumbled, there is no plot as such and again endless reference to mexican poets. Very forgettable.