Amulet - Robert Bolaño

At the centre of Amulet is Auxilio Lacouture, an exile from Uruguay who has come to Mexico in 1965 turning up on the doorsteps of poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfías, dusting and cleaning, anything to just be in their presence and bathe in their majesty. Everything changes however when the military occupy the university in Mexico City in September 1968 and Auxilio, occupying the ladies bathroom of the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, is the only person remaining undetected in the building.

Whether what follows is real or imagined by Auxilio over the twelve days in a semi-hallucinatory state, partly induced by the reading of poetry, it’s clear that the incident at the university is an event of major importance for the nation, the fulcrum for what is to unfold. In the subsequent years Auxilio becomes, or perhaps sees herself, as the mother of Mexican poetry for a new generation, a friend of surrealist artists, avant-garde poets, writers and theatre directors, among them the Chilean writer and alter-ego of the author Arturo Belano. Auxilio has high hopes for the generation that follows in the footsteps of Felipe and Garfías, and that the spirit of poetry and revolution will bring transformation to Latin American politics and thinking.

Coming from Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean exile himself, living in Mexico before settling in Spain where he only recently died at the age of 50, Amulet inevitably deals with questions of nationality and identity, looking to find whether there is some kind of deeper commonality between people being South American, a revolutionary, or simply in the nature of being a poet or an artist. This means that Amulet – while being on the surface a slim and readable book – is not straightforward in terms of any narrative path or time frame, the writing flowing, searching, interweaving people and places, time and memories, purposefully and compellingly drawing the reader along through a fabulous array of real and fictional characters.