While I enjoyed the beginning and the end of Amuleto, I did not enjoy the book overall. 

Most of the time I was annoyed or bored. I just wanted the book to end but the process got dragged out even longer for me because my mind kept wandering and so I’d have to go back and re-read pages. For some reason, this style of writing doesn’t bother me as much in Savage Detectives, maybe because the first part was written in a different way (more journal-style entries) and maybe because we have different voices in part two, but I found Auxilio’s repetition extremely annoying (how many times did she say she was the mother of Mexican poetry?). At first I found it funny, but after a while I got annoyed. It felt like a weird way to fill in the words but Amuleto is a short story, so why the fillers? I provide an example here:

“Tal vez más delgada, pero en realidad no estaba más delgada. Tal vez más demacrada, aunque en realidad no estaba más demacrada. Tal vez más callada, pero me bastaron tres minutos para darme cuenta de que tampoco estana más callada… (Maybe more skinny but she wasn’t less skinny. Maybe more haggard [is this the correct translation?] although in reality she wasn’t more haggard. Maybe quieter but it took me three minutes to realize she wasn’t quieter either…)” (Bolaño 38-39).

The stories all seemed the same and so it felt like it was all blending together. I also hated the dialogue-style of writing, the back and forth of “I said and then she said and then I responded”… Sometimes it made for such long sentences and I just found it dull to read that over and over again. I named this post pulling teeth because that’s how it felt for me to get through this book… and what was with the two-pages of her prophecies?? It seemed unnecessary to me. 

However, as I mentioned above, I did enjoy the ending. I found it more interesting to read about these “dreams” she was having, conversing with other artists, such as Remedios Varo and Lilian Serpas. Since she continued to talk about being in the bathroom, on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, you could really see how traumatic of an experience this was for her (and I’m sure would have been for anyone). There were moments in which I thought maybe she had actually died and she was conversing with these dead artists in the Otherworld. It was interesting to notice as well that she seemed to be acknowledging more of her Uruguyan side, rather than just being the mother of Mexican poetry towards the end of the book. She is even surprised to find that her escalofríos (shivers) are Uruguyan and the guardian angel of her dreams is Argentinian, and we see more use of “vos” rather than “tú.” It seemed like an interesting coming home for her, perhaps as she was on the threshold of life and death?

I will admit that I’m glad this book is over though, and we can continue with Savage Detectives and our book-of-choice.