It’s hard to believe that I only read my first Roberto Bolaño bookback in November! He’s spent the last 6 months on a meteoric rise to the top of my list of favorite authors. Is he...my favorite? I'd say he currently shares the top spot with my bestie Virginia Woolf.
Anyways, Amulet was my fifth Bolaño and reading it felt like slipping in to catch up with an old friend. It follows Auxilio Lacouture, an Uruguayan immigrant to Mexico, who hides in the bathroom for 15 days during the army's 1968 occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. I was especially looking forward to this one - it was recommended to me a while back by @kaybee, and it's a novella-length expansion of one of my favorite sections of The Savage Detectives.
"This is going to be a horror story" begins Auxilio, the self-dubbed "mother of Mexican Poetry", and as she resists the occupation by hiding in the bathroom, her memories begin to shift forwards and backwards through time. As the book progresses, she takes us through a series of episodes (which, in classic Bolaño fashion, often involve poets, including his own alter ego Arturo Belano) dominated by unspoken emotional wounds and steeped in the heightened unreality of the night. It's a fascinatingly indirect approach to his real subject, a lament for the broken dreams of Latin America's mid-20th century revolutionary youth, of which Bolaño was a part.
This one was unmistakably Bolaño, but it also felt different from his other work that I've read - it's more poetic and lyrical, with frequent shifts into symbolically-charged dreams and imaginings, which is leveraged especially well in the book's absolutely perfect ending. It's got some of his best prose, and Chris Andrews' translation captures it well.
I loved Amulet a lot and ended up blowing through it in 3 days - my Tuesday in particular turned into a marathon reading session of more than half the book! I've already got 3 more Bolaño books on my shelf - I can't wait to keep moving through his oeuvre.