“AMULET” BY ROBERTO BOLANO
“Amulet,” coming out this month, is Chilean born Roberto Bolaño’s latest work to be translated into English. Bolaño, who died July 15, 2003, is said to be the most influential Latin American writer of his generation. Like Fante, Bukowski, and Choukri, Bolaño writes in a deceptively simple and stylistically bold style that is deeply rooted in a pragmatism mainstream literature, against which he had an unabated hatred, finds too raw.
“Amulet” is the story of and narrated by Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan poet living illegally in Mexico. Auxilio, who refers to herself as “the mother of Mexican poetry,” was holed up in the university bathroom reading a poetry book for twelve days while Mexican army occupied the National Autonomous University in Mexico; it was 1968, and days before the Tlateloco massacre caused by Mexican president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz when he ordered the army to indiscriminately fire into a large crowd of students protesting at Mexico City’s Plaza of Three Cultures. When she emerges from the Bathroom, she is seen as the surviving embodiment of the revolution. The reader can never be sure about that fact because the “I” narration occludes outside opinions of her. The character of Auxilio is typical of other Bolaño’s novels. She is a convergence of incongruous attributes. She is not attractive – missing her front teeth and challenged in terms of personal hygiene, but she effuses realism. She evokes in the reader sympathy for being illegally in Mexico and trapped in the bathroom of a university overtaken by Mexican soldiers; one can not help but feel the intensity of her fear. The opening passage of Amulet reads:
“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.”
Other books of Bolaño I recommend: The Last Evening on Earth, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile.
Ahmed T. B. Copyright © 2008
