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A review by flexluthor
Amulet by Roberto Bolaño
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Maybe the best book I'll ever read. This has got everything Bolano: poets-as-revolutionaries, the self insert character who blurs the lines between fiction and autobiography, the obsession with casting Latin America as a graveyard waiting to be filled. It also has some of the most beautiful prose probably ever written, and some truly fantastic wordplay that legitimately made me laugh ("Though there were no eagles around, I saw an eagle eyed view...").
Auxilio Lacouture is the mother of all Mexican poetry (by her claim) despite not being Mexican (or maybe even a poet?), perhaps mirroring Bolano's own feelings as a Chilean writing so often about Mexico and Mexicans. As she hides in the bathroom of a Mexico City University to avoid a militarized police occupation she casts backwards and (somewhat confusingly) forward through time to tell her life story. The bathroom frame narrative actually doesn't come up very often but acts as a lens through which Auxilio views her entire life.
Arturo Belano is Bolano's fictional alter-ego who shows up (and stars) in many of his novels and is largely featured here as a poet with whom Auxilio spends much of her time. This raises a question of Bolano's (the author's) commitment to truth telling in his semi-biographical works. Auxilio talks of Belano (the character) falling into drug abuse, traveling to Allende's Chile (Bolano's/Belano's (the author's and the character's) home country) and coming back to Mexico City a haunted man, and being party to the birth of a new wave of Mexican poets. All of this is true, and all of this is false depending on how much you believe in Bolano's (the author's) desire to purposely mislead the reader, to use the frame of biography as a purposeful trick to play: his characters inhabit a real world that differs from our real world just as much or as little as Bolano (the author) and the reader want it to.
One of the more notable aspects of this book is that it is the only text written by Bolano wherein the number 2666 appears (disregarding the book titled that, which never actually has "2666" appear in its text). Auxilio describes a street in Mexico City, Avenida Guerrero, as more like "... a cemetery in the year 2666" than an avenue. And thus again is referenced Bolano's great obsession: Latin America (Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay in this book) is a land of corpses. One must imagine a cemetery in 2666 as a decrepit, overgrown, forgotten place, so many people having walked over the graves inside that they are no longer recognizable mounds. Many of Bolano's books seem to carry this conflation of the land of Latin America with death and violence: 2666 references hundreds of killings carried out in a fictional Mexican city, By Night in Chile has a preoccupation with Pinochet's mass graves filled with Chilean citizens, The Savage Detectives' frequent travels leave wakes littered with dead bodies. It's inescapable, reading Bolano's work one feels a claustrophobic sense of dread, of the walls of a grave closing in with each word. The further I read the more I became certain Auxilio's story ends with the walls of her bathroom stall becoming coffin walls.
And yet -- in perhaps the most cathartic, soaring part of this novel Bolano commits to memory the names of some of history's most celebrated writers, Latinx and not, for several straight pages. In what seems to be an effort to save them from the fate of unidentified graves in the year 2666 he has Auxilio deliver prophecy describing the futures of dozens of real world authors: some are reborn, some are critically re-evaluated, some enter Purgatory. All this is prophesied to happen between the 20th and 22nd century, notably no prediction sees further into the future than the year that hangs over the book: 2666. Perhaps Bolano is saying that regardless of Auxilio's prophecy, regardless of Purgatory, regardless of the appreciation of their work, we will all eventually end up in " ...a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else. "
5/5 stars, again probably the best book I've ever read.
Auxilio Lacouture is the mother of all Mexican poetry (by her claim) despite not being Mexican (or maybe even a poet?), perhaps mirroring Bolano's own feelings as a Chilean writing so often about Mexico and Mexicans. As she hides in the bathroom of a Mexico City University to avoid a militarized police occupation she casts backwards and (somewhat confusingly) forward through time to tell her life story. The bathroom frame narrative actually doesn't come up very often but acts as a lens through which Auxilio views her entire life.
Arturo Belano is Bolano's fictional alter-ego who shows up (and stars) in many of his novels and is largely featured here as a poet with whom Auxilio spends much of her time. This raises a question of Bolano's (the author's) commitment to truth telling in his semi-biographical works. Auxilio talks of Belano (the character) falling into drug abuse, traveling to Allende's Chile (Bolano's/Belano's (the author's and the character's) home country) and coming back to Mexico City a haunted man, and being party to the birth of a new wave of Mexican poets. All of this is true, and all of this is false depending on how much you believe in Bolano's (the author's) desire to purposely mislead the reader, to use the frame of biography as a purposeful trick to play: his characters inhabit a real world that differs from our real world just as much or as little as Bolano (the author) and the reader want it to.
One of the more notable aspects of this book is that it is the only text written by Bolano wherein the number 2666 appears (disregarding the book titled that, which never actually has "2666" appear in its text). Auxilio describes a street in Mexico City, Avenida Guerrero, as more like "... a cemetery in the year 2666" than an avenue. And thus again is referenced Bolano's great obsession: Latin America (Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay in this book) is a land of corpses. One must imagine a cemetery in 2666 as a decrepit, overgrown, forgotten place, so many people having walked over the graves inside that they are no longer recognizable mounds. Many of Bolano's books seem to carry this conflation of the land of Latin America with death and violence: 2666 references hundreds of killings carried out in a fictional Mexican city, By Night in Chile has a preoccupation with Pinochet's mass graves filled with Chilean citizens, The Savage Detectives' frequent travels leave wakes littered with dead bodies. It's inescapable, reading Bolano's work one feels a claustrophobic sense of dread, of the walls of a grave closing in with each word. The further I read the more I became certain Auxilio's story ends with the walls of her bathroom stall becoming coffin walls.
And yet -- in perhaps the most cathartic, soaring part of this novel Bolano commits to memory the names of some of history's most celebrated writers, Latinx and not, for several straight pages. In what seems to be an effort to save them from the fate of unidentified graves in the year 2666 he has Auxilio deliver prophecy describing the futures of dozens of real world authors: some are reborn, some are critically re-evaluated, some enter Purgatory. All this is prophesied to happen between the 20th and 22nd century, notably no prediction sees further into the future than the year that hangs over the book: 2666. Perhaps Bolano is saying that regardless of Auxilio's prophecy, regardless of Purgatory, regardless of the appreciation of their work, we will all eventually end up in " ...a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else. "
5/5 stars, again probably the best book I've ever read.