s.penkevich's Reviews > Amulet

History is like a horror story.

The student youth of Mexico raised their fists in protest during the summer and fall of 1968, marching against the government towards the violent climax of the Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2nd. ¹ Student demonstrations were organized in response to the killings of several students by the police called in to repress a fight between gang members of two rival schools—the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM) and National Politechnical Institute (IPN)—and were further aggravated by the upcoming summer Olympics taking place in Mexico City. The Olympic Committee, headed by an American, chose Mexico as the first third-world country to host an Olympic event, and protestors saw this as an attempt to portray Mexico as a country stabilized by American support and financial backing. Protestors took to the streets shouting ‘We Don't Want Olympic Games, We Want a Revolution!’ Roberto Bolaño’s slim, yet satisfying, Amulet has as its centerpiece the Mexican army occupation of UNAM, using the violent event as a nucleus around which narrator Auxilio Lacouture’s life events orbit. Finding herself trapped in the UNAM bathroom during the occupation, a subtle yet monumental act of resistance, Auxilio becomes unstuck in time, narrating events both past, present and future, yet always returning to the moonlight reflecting off the tiles of the lonely bathroom floor. Through pure poetic ecstasy, Bolaño uses Auxilio’s beautiful mind and perspective to brilliantly juxtapose seemingly disparate elements in order to paint a unified and emotionally charged portrait of the struggles, sorrows and strife of the Latin American people.


Student demonstration, August 27th, 1968

‘I could say I am the mother of Mexican poetry, Auxilio says on the opening page, ‘but I better not. I know all the poets and all the poets know me.’ Drifting in extreme poverty through the streets of Mexico City like so many others, Auxilio is a glorious soul that finds odd jobs at the university to earn her keep while spending her nights in drunken sublimity with the young Mexican poets, such as the authors alter-ego, Arturo Belano, caring for them as a mother while being shamelessly enraptured by their poetry. Auxilio has a rare gift of seeing the events of the world, past and future, unfold before her eyes, unlocked during her isolation in the UNAM bathroom, but with this gift comes great costs. It would be easy to dismiss her as crazy, a woman missing teeth (‘I lost my teeth on the alter of human sacrifice’) and crying at the words of people half her age before leaving the bars without paying, yet that would be a grave misunderstanding and would deny oneself an illuminating look into her heart and soul.

I never paid, or hardly ever. I was the one who could see into the past and those who can see into the past never pay. But I could also see into the future and vision of that kind comes at a high price: life, sometimes, or sanity. So I figured I was paying, night after forgotten night, though nobody realized it; I was paying for everyone’s round, the kids who would be poets and those who never would.

I like to believe that one of the many gifts of literature is to cultivate a more open-minded view and to learn acceptance of others. Auxilio must face the horrors of history, of existence, in a way others cannot, and must travel to the vicious depths of her soul that most minds form a wall to protect themselves from having to journey into. Like a snake that unhinges its jaw to swallow a large meal, Auxilio must unhinge her mind—at least by the common socially accepted, or clinical, standards²in order to swallow such enormous thoughts and burdensome truths. She witnesses the pains and poverty of others, and is charged with the task of putting it all together to witness the birth of History and document it across the ages.

The birth of History can’t wait, and if we arrive late you won’t see anything, only ruins and smoke, an empty landscape, and you’ll be alone again forever even if you go out and get drunk with your poet friends every night

Bolaño possessed an incredible gift for organizing seemingly unrelated events into a unified message. Auxilio’s skipping across time bears witness to many different characters and subtly probes into their hearts, making Amulet almost feel like a collection of short stories, with them all orbiting around one narrator. Yet, somehow through the juxtaposition, Bolaño manages to make each story mesh, creating a space between each idea where the reader’s mind will occupy and abstractly connect each element, each theme, into one larger, all-encompassing image. These are stories of poverty, resilience, heartbreak, rebellion, bravery and even an investigation into the story of Erigone and Orestes. The conflict between students and government is also juxtaposed with the overthrowing of Allende in Chile, in which Belano plays a role. While no connection is never made overt, the themes of conflict and revolution are enough to give the reader a sense of the violence haunting Bolaño . What is most impressive and satisfying, however, is the way Bolaño orchestrates a world where literature is of the utmost importance, giving meaning and validation to the lives of those who give meaning through its application to the sights and sounds of the horror show of History playing out around them.

Much in the ways Auxilio binds the lives of those around her into one common, driving force, Amulet serves to bind together the oeuvre of its author. As Distant Star is the elaboration of the final story in Nazi Literature in the Americas, Amulet expands on Auxilio’s small, but unforgettable account in The Savage Detectives. While Amulet may be a minor work, it plays a key role in the Bolaño universe, expanding on the themes that constitute the life-giving roots of his work. The idea that violence plagues Latin America through all eternity is glimpsed, even connecting itself to his magnum opus 2666 through a hallucinatory passage as Auxilio follows Belano towards a potentially deadly confrontation:

Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren’t stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn’t feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but 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.

This intertextuality is one of the many reasons that it is hard to go long without returning to the poetic pages of a Bolaño book, creating a world that seems to come alive through repeat characters.

Short, yet overflowing with passages of sheer beauty reminiscent of Bolaño’s prose poems that are sure to drain your pen dry underlining each gem, Amulet is a wonderful trip through horrific and melancholy events. Auxilio may only play a small role in the uprisings, yet her small role forever transfixes her into mythological magnitude in history, becoming a beacon of hope and a symbol of fortitude for the weak and weary to seek comfort and redemption. The final pages are the most haunting, culminating all the sorrows and struggles into a song of revolution that will live on regardless of the body count at the oppressive hands of both the army and history. Similarly, while Bolaño may have passed, his voice lives on. It is certainly a voice worth listening to.
4/5

‘ I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.’

¹The following history of the 1968 student revolution is paraphrased from the article October 2nd is Not Forgotten.

²As discussed in Machado De Assis’ The Alienist, we are all uniquely wired (or, perhaps, uniquely weird), and who is really to say what constitutes sanity. Understandably there must be clinical standards, I’m not here to disparage the psychological community in any way, however, Auxilio is a wonderful literary example of how we often write off others without truly attempting to understand them and see the world through their eyes. By dismissing her as crazy, you lose the opportunity to unlock the world and learn through her. Laziness is similar, and often dismissing someone as lazy is actually the lazy way out; even what appears as laziness is a highly complex set of emotions and actions that offer deeper insights into a person. Not that this is a universal law, but hopefully you get the point. I’m moralizing now, which makes me extraordinarily uncomfortable, so I’ll conclude by reiterating that literature, and characters like Auxilio, plead that we try harder to understand and accept one another instead of casting one another aside through negatively connotative dismissals.

‘I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.’