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Liked It “Amulet revisits the terrain of The Savage Detectives. It is, in fact, a reworking of part of the longer work with the emphasis changed. Auxilio Lacouture, an Uruguyan living in Mexico city recounts events from her bohemian life among poets and academics, including the lightly...” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“Amulet revisits the terrain of The Savage Detectives. It is, in fact, a reworking of part of the longer work with the emphasis changed. Auxilio Lacouture, an Uruguyan living in Mexico city recounts events from her bohemian life among poets and academics, including the lightly disguised "Arturo Belano".
Riddley wrote this review Monday, October 24, 2011. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
From the very start we are told that this book is a "horror story. A story of murder, deception 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."
Auxilio was in the women's bathroom at the University when troops took it over, an action which saw the shooting of hundreds of students in Mexico's equivalent of Tiananmen Square. She stayed shut up in the bathroom for 12 days, without anything to eat, and during that time it seems that she stepped outside the space time continuum, as she can remember the future as well as the past.
Auxilio calls herself the mother of Mexican poetry, her maternal instinct stretching from acting as unpaid cleaner for two of the eminences grise of the scene when she arrived in Mexico to spending nights (but not money, she rarely paid) amidst a hubbub of poets and academics with poverty for her constant companion. "And sometimes I said to myself: These kids are our hope. But other times I thought: Some hope, a bunch of drunk kids.."
It is as though events coalesce and dissipate in the clouds of cigarette smoke, people coming into focus and disappearing but all shot through with a passion for meaning and truth. It is as if poetry mattered, as if meaning mattered, in a world that has forgotten both: "they gave me their poems to read, their verses, their fuddled translations, and I took these sheets of foolscap and read them in silence, with my back to the table where they were raising their glasses desperately trying to be ingenious or ironic or cynical, poor angels, and I plunged into those words (I can't in all honesty say into that river of words, although I would like to, since it wasn't so much a river as an incohate babble), letting them seep into my very marrow, I spent a moment alone with those words choked by the brilliance and sadness of youth, with those splinters of a shattered dime store mirror, and I looked at myself or rather for myself in them, and there I was."
We never see the horror, as promised, but we get something which can perhaps protect us from it, an amulet. We get a song of the dead, "a barely audible song, a song of war and love, because although the children were clearly marching to war, the way they marched recalled the superb, theatrical attitudes of love."
Longer review at http://theknockingshop.blogspot.com/2011/10/amulet.html”
“Stream of consciousness narrative seems to be near compulsory for novelists, Bolano does it well in the role of a female too. By far the best novel of his read so far, with many autobiographical hints. ”
Hydriotaphia wrote this review Tuesday, October 4, 2011. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I can admit that I'm not smart enough for Bolano. Equally at ease with the metaphysical and the surreal, he makes Marquez look like a guy struggling just to try and remember his prayers. Bolano saunters in and out among symbols both stridently intellectual and those he's apparently invented just for the moment; me, I'm out of breath, psychically, just trying to keep up.
Il'ja wrote this review Monday, July 11, 2011. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
This might just be a great little novel. But don't ask me how I know that.”
“I didn't enjoy reading this book, but I can appreciate the author's evident talent.”
Kate wrote this review Wednesday, December 29, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I am very much in two minds about this book. I think it is partly the narrative style - the hallucinatory, almost stream of consciousness meanderings of the narrator while she is hiding in a women's lavatory in Mexico University when government forces occupy it in 1968 (or possibly looking back on this event) and the lack of a real plot, neither of which are things I am particularly fond. The narrative voice is haunting and evocative and definitely stays in the mind after the book is finished, as it weaves together observations on the soul of Mexico as seen through the demi monde of its aspiring artists and poets with references to mythology, politics and especially literary figures. All of these things - the dreamlike narrative, the references to mythology and name dropping - can sometimes be used to give work a fake sense of profundity, especially when as here an unfamiliarity with the part of the world and it's literature (except for Borges and Marquez, Latin American literature is an unknown to me) makes it tempting to ascribe one's lack of understanding to the profoundness of the work.
Pez wrote this review Thursday, November 25, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
It was, however, intriguing, and I may still go on to read his other, far heftier, novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 in the hope that the command of language and experimentation may be coupled with something more substantial.”
“rating: 2.5/5.0”
alvin r. c. wrote this review Tuesday, November 23, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I found this book ok but not as good as his others.”
Edge Z wrote this review Friday, October 22, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Good in parts but called for knowledge of Latin American art & literature which - since I didn't know who he was writing about - got in the way.
David F wrote this review Thursday, June 10, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Worth reading though - quite a short novel”
“Strange stuff from the currently "most admired" writer of Latin America. A half-mad, rambling, unreliable narrator describes fragments of her life among poets and artists in Mexico City. Think Dostoevsky with moments of surreal beauty a la Bruno Schulz, described with Vonnegut innocence. It has a curious tug, but ultimately it's not for me.”
Dan McNeill wrote this review Thursday, March 25, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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