ACCORDING to my books-review app, I read Amulet for the first time from March 09, 2025 to March 15, 2025. 

An attempt to reconstruct, recall, remember what motivated me to read the novel brings forth an image to mind. I must looked up books included in previously taught courses. Amulet was listed. I loan it from the library. I read it. 

SAVED ON MY GALLERY is an imagine dated March 13, 2025. I must have been at a table. Logging my thoughts of Amulet into a books-reviewing platform. 

My re-read for this class is marked with nostalgia. Because I loved this book again. Once again: I am introduced to Auxilio.

“My name is Auxilio Lacouture and I am Uruguayan—I come from Montevideo—although when I get nostalgic, when homesickness wells up and overwhelms me, I say I’m a Charrúa, which is more or less the same thing, though not exactly, and it confuses Mexicans and other Latin Americans too” (4).

Alcira Soust Scaffo (1924-1997). Uruguayan teacher and poet.

From the beginning, Axulio’s voice is a first-person account. Her imagination is vivid. Auxilio Lacouture’s narration in Amulet enacts rhizomatic thought (as proposed by A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) through its nonlinear temporality, associative logic, and dispersed subjectivity. For instance, she “I came to Mexico City in 1967, or maybe it was 1965, or 1962. I’ve got no memory for dates anymore, or exactly where my wanderings took me; all I know is that I came to Mexico and never went back. Hold on, let me try to remember” (4)

Auxilio’s narrator is as she thinks. Train of thoughts are palpable. It is interior character monologue. It is associative, following non-linear thoughts, always reminiscing on the scene of the days in the bathroom.

“Then I heard a murmur that rose through the cold air of evening in the valley toward the mountainsides and crags, and I was astonished. They were singing. The children, the young people, were singing and heading for the abyss. I raised a hand to my mouth, as if to stifle a shout, and held the other hand out in front of me, fingers extended and trembling, as if trying to touch them. My mind endeavored to remember a text about children intoning canticles as they marched to war. But it was no use. My mind was inside out. The journey through the snow had turned me into skin. Perhaps that is how I had always been. Intelligence has never been my strength” (89)

This is important as the text’s format parallels the protagonist-narrator’s inner world, repeating the same memories, jumping between narrations of different temporalities.

In another instance, while at the bathroom, Auxilio’s narration goes on a “time-capsule” to predict the future of that era and predecessor literary scenes.

“…A statue of Nicanor Parra, however, shall stand in a Chilean square in the year 2059. A statue of Octavio Paz shall stand in a Mexican square in the year 2020. A rather small statue of Ernesto Cardenal shall stand in a Nicaraguan square in the year 2018.But all statues tumble eventually, by divine intervention or the power of dynamite, like the statue of Heine. So let us not place too much trust in statues. Carson McCullers, however, shall go on being read in the year 2100. Alejandra Pizarnik shall lose her last reader in the year 2100. Alfonsina Storni shall be reincarnated as a cat or a sea-lion, I can’t tell which, in the year 2050. The case of Anton Chekhov shall be slightly different: he shall be reincarnated in the year 2003, in the year 2010, and then in the year 2014. He shall appear once more in the year 2081. And never again after that. Alice Sheldon shall appeal to the masses in the year 2017. Alfonso Reyes shall be killed once and for all in the year 2058, but in fact it shall be Reyes who kills his killers. Marguerite Duras shall live in the nervous system of thousands of women in the year 2035…” (79).

Marguerite Duras (1914 Gia Dinh, French Indo China – 1996, Paris France) novelist, filmmaker, playwright

Moreover, Auxilio also daydreams conversations with then-defunct Remedios Varo (1908–1963)

IN page 98, Auxilio’s train of thought goes as follow: “I was back in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and it was September 1968 and I was thinking about the adventures of Remedios Varo. There are so few people left who remember Remedios Varo. I never met her. I would sincerely love to be able to say that I’d met her, but the truth is that I never did. I have known marvelous women, strong as mountains or ocean currents, but I never met Remedios Varo. Not because I was too timid to pay her a visit at her house, not because I didn’t admire her work (which I admire wholeheartedly), but because Remedios Varo died in 1963, and in 1963 I was still living in my beloved, faraway Montevideo”. Auxilio admits she has never met Varo. Yet further up the text, she imagines, daydreams a memory of meeting and visiting Varo. Auxilio exhibits narration filling in gaps of memory, wherein imagined encounters (e.g., with Remedios Varo) are integrated into autobiographical memory. Thus, the memory of the bathroom scene becomes layered: as Auxilio revisits it, imagined encounters (such as with Remedios Varo) are folded into the narration, not as stable facts, but as associative extensions of memory itself.

PERSONAL COMMENTARY

[On the pretext..]

Amulet is dedicated “For Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (Mexico City, 1953-1998).”

Mexican poet and co-founder of the infrarrealista poetry movement. 

In our misery we wanted to scream for help, but there was no one there to come to our aid — Petronius

Beautiful dedication to his friend. I wonder the epigraph might have meant for them?  \…/

“Alfonsina Storni shall be reincarnated as a cat or a sea-lion, I can’t tell which, in the year 2050.” Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938). Swiss-Argentine poet and playwright of the modernist period.

Does Alfonsina get to be a cat or sea-lion because just as Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier and Virginia Woolf, Alfonsina decided to drown? Axulio’s imagination surely does stretch.

Auxilio’s imagination stretches, folds, and reconfigures memory and history, creating a narrative both personal and mythic. In Amulet, there is imagination, associative leaps, and homage.

POEM OF THE WEEK:

   It is a summary, a regurgitation of an introduction by poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar to an Anglo-Saxon charm Against a Growth. From 975, by Unknown.

A poem, 

divine chant,

activated by its own sound 

virtue of being in the air. 

There will be a part two before next Thursday. When I am done the second-choice book. Thus, this is a catch up post, delayed by procrastination. Lack of discipline.

ON Retrospective….

I am now 230 pages in. I have roughly 200 pages to finish before next Thursday.

THE NARRATIVE

Part two: The Revolution in the Hotel FAUSTO CABREBA and LUZ ELENA are involved in the political scene of Peking. Then at one point, Marinella starts seeing a boy. At the opulent hotel they reside in, the Crooks, a family composed of David Crooks (Spaniard), his wife Isabel, “a blond Canadian with a soft gaze who’d been born in China” (137, online pdf, not my paperback) and their “sons in order of height: Carl, Michael, and Paul” (137) starts frequenting the pools of their hotel. Marienella gradually takes a liking to Paul. Carl is 17 years old. Marienella: 15. She starts reading books, reading Marx as a way of having conversations with Carl, and thus grow closer to him. They eventually go on a few days. Fausto disapproves of the relationship. He is straightforward, commands Marienella to put an end to the relationship.

Then…

Fausto and Luz Elena get an outpost in Colombia. Clandestine work for the Communist party. But they decide that Colombia may not be safe for the children; thus they are to study in China. They get to have a huge hotel with staff just for the two of them. Because the parents think their current hotel would deviate their children to debauchery, if left alone. And they are protected and checked upon by The China–Latin America and Caribbean Friendship Association. Before they leave, they leave an envelope with various written instructions in how to go on about life.

“What is the objective of staying in China? There might be two: a) To study and prepare intellectually to become in the future a “worthy man” as they say. This means trying to stand out, earnmoney, fame, etc. All this, naturally, at the cost of the misery and suffering of others, of the exploitation of man by man. b) The other objective is to achieve an ideological and sentimental proletariat transformation and prepare to serve society, the people, the revolution. Not entering on the road to transformation would mean staying halfway down the road. To be a “revolutionary” with a bourgeois mentality means being a revisionist in practice. Going back to Colombia before having firmly entered into that transformation seems to me to have simply wasted your time in China, and not achieved the objective. In my opinion, if you enter into that authentic transformation, well cemented, you will be ready for a possible return” (146)

“In the capitalist world it is common and even natural for people your age to have boyfriends or girlfriends. Why? In the first place the young have no ideals, no true worries, they spend their lives thinking only of that, dependent on that. It’ s the focus of their interest. It is a corrupted society that pins its greatest hopes on passion and sex. We already know the results: disgrace, solitude, anguish, terror, etc. What is the next step? Either jump in and marry young with no maturity, tying yourself down to duties that will prevent you from fulfilling your life, your ideals, as well as later problems, or enter into an atmosphere around which the basic fact of life is that, gradually falling into a degeneration where the only important thing in life is sex” (151). 

Marienella continues to see Carl, as the kids become aware of the Cultural Revolution overtaking Peking. Sergio joins a party for the Red Army. He observes the fervent vehemence of strong belief, the same that would soon overtake him. The Red Army is present everywhere. Those that are seemed to betray the new ideology are shunned. For instance, page 147 details a teacher who is kicked en masse by his entire class.

“The drafting teacher, a thin, bespectacled man whom all the pupils liked, had begun to discuss in his class the concept of aerodynamics. That’s what he was talking about when he spontaneously compared the Soviet MiG, a combat plane designed in 1939 and produced in small quantities after the war, with the F-4 Phantom II, which McDonnell Douglas had brought into service in 1960. Both planes, Soviet and American, had been used in the Vietnam War, but the teacher had no reason to think of that when he praised the design of the Phantom II and dared to say it was better. An uncomfortable silence fell over the classroom. “But that is the enemy’s plane,” a pupil said after a moment. Sergio didn’t know if the teacher had realized his mistake, but he tried briefly to defend himself: “Yes, it is. But its design is better. For example, it is faster. Why is it faster?” But his attempts fell into the void. The class was indignant. A murmur of disapproval grew ever louder. And that was when a pupil said: “If he prefers the enemy’s weapons, he must be an enemy.”

Mao’s image is everywhere. So is the Red Army and the talks about new ideals. Marienella bonds closer with Carl and starts spending days and nights at their house. A new chapter begins, in the present moment of the second narrative. It is grown up Sergio Cabrera spending a day with his son in Spain. The memory of Carl’s father is involuntarily invoked. David Crooks — and now we learn that he fought in the Spanish civil war. There is mystery. Analepsis: Young Sergio Cabrera. The cultural war causes for their forced leave from their hotel (it must be stressed it is a huge hotel solely for themselves and staff). The Red Army wants to occupy it. And they are kicked out of the hotel from where they are taught because Sergio dates a girl. Smilka. Her father is a “Yugoslavian diplomat” (172). He works for a media translation organization, based in Peking and apparently has libed the Red Party. As for Marienella, she is scolded

“Your duty was to denounce your brother, and you did not. And the party does not know if it can still trust you” (176)

Marinella’s relationship with young intellectual, Carl, ends. The Crooks are to go abroad, on a long vacation granted by the Association.

ON Juan Gabriel Vásquez

The story line is great. It is autobiographical, narrative-heavy, told through exposition, dialogue. It features constant analepsis and prolepsis. It is a story that pulls me in. I am interested in learning more about J. G. V.

Obviously, I am reading in translation. So I am curious of its Spanish form and prose. I want to pick up more books by him.

Also interested in the Cabrera family. In one scene, Sergio recounts the public reception of his film adaptation of Wendy Guerra’s Everyone Leaves. The Cuban public (and his father, Fausto) (I) dislike the source material’s author (II) think the story is anti-revolutionary. It is a story about a girl affected by political violence, no matter the side. Sergio feels strong about the movie, believes it in, thinks it ahead of its time. An underdog in his auteurial filmography. I would be interested in watching some of the Cabreras film in the future.

Now I would be interested to know at what point in the story Sergio decides to become a filmmaker.

I think I’ve been trying to sit with the why of it all. Why is this the ending Bolaño chose? What does ending on a short flashback section achieve for the story? Is it to sandwich the book between two Garcia Madero sections for symmetry? Did he want a chance to play around with the idea of a travelogue/ road trip novel in a more traditional way, outside of the interviews in the middle sections?

This section was fun and I love the idea of a road trip, especially one where you’re out looking for clues, but the mention of all the different spiders they were facing ruined the fun vibes for me (I’ll stay home, thank you): “Night noises: wolf spiders, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, black widows, desert toads” (630). Garcia Madero was as insufferable as ever. He spent so many words making sure we knew he found Cesárea overweight and how he couldn’t believe he was sleeping with Lupe. It doesn’t seem like he likes his friends much, not even Belano or Lima, constantly making comments and sounding annoyed at what they say or how they act.

I was also thinking a lot about the flow of the text/ the pacing as I was reading, mainly how Bolaño slows the text down when it starts to pick up pace. Like when they’re going through the drawings of the sombrero over lines and guessing what was drawn, and Lupe’s guesses are coming quicker and quicker. Then, she gets stumped for one second and suddenly Garcia Madero is commenting on a dead plant he sees approaching in the distance, narrating a bit of the landscape (612). It takes the readers out of the game for those few lines and slows down the narrative before resuming the game for four more drawings. I don’t know what, exactly, his aim was with this but it helped remind me that they’re still on the road and that the journey is still moving forward? Or is it just his placement of an omen, like on the next page when they end on the drawing of “[f]our Mexicans keeping vigil over a body” (613). A little foreshadowing.

Throughout the book, there were certain parts where I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be funny and I just don’t understand the joke, or if the audience is purposefully being left out of the joke and it isn’t supposed to make sense outside of the “in” crowd. An example in this section is when the group was stopped by patrolmen when leaving Nacozari: “Are you from Nacozari, officer? Lupe asks him. The patrolman looks at her and says no, why would she think that, he’s from Hermosillo. Belano and Lima laugh” (602). Or, later on, with “Just the mention of Maximilian’s army cracks us right up… A Belgian head of a Belgian regiment. It cracks us up. A Belgian-Mexican regiment” (638). Literally what are they talking about?

To conclude my thoughts on this conclusion to The Savage Detectives, I enjoyed this section (maybe?) more than the previous ones. It felt like a Christmas special in a tv series. This could have been because it was shorter, or because it was a story where the main characters are all together in an isolated sort of tale. Overall, I’ll probably give The Savage Detectives a 3.75/5 star rating, in that it was good for what it was but I probably won’t reread it or recommend/ lend it out to friends.

Poem of this week is: not a poem, but a phrase, penned by me.

Eje tematico: la Vida

Thematic focus: Life. 

— 

ONCE a university friend, from a different nation, my original nation, said university made him read faster. And so I learned. This is a new technique I have learned from RMST 202 and 495. I have finished the novel now? What do I take out of it: auto-fiction, writing as a means of purpose, life as a thematic focus. The human condition driven by desires of recognition, to be seen and not seen. Sexual pleasures, and poetry readings. The Savage Detectives is a triptych, yet a confusing one. I cannot say whether this novel can be categorized as “hated” or “loved” within my literary taste. All subjectives aside, the novel had to be read.

Part three was interesting. Due to its jokes and the texts aesthetics similar to a thriller movie. A badly made one if adapted by the wrong-hands.

The Visceral Realists (infra realists) now and then:

Xochitl: writes. Publishes. Makes a life with her little Franz.

Maria and Angelica: Unheard of after given a voice.

In memoriam: San Epifanio (what a lovely name), Luscious Skin, Tinajero.

As I read the novel, I think of Joni Mitchell’s song, Both Sides Now. 

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

Ulises Lima: Mario Papasquiaro. Dies on ’98. Presumably when the novel comes out.

Arturo Belano: lives on. (until when?)

Reading the now and then I feel a pang of what. I don’t know. I desperately seek maturity off this novel, any philosophy that I can tackle onto, so that I can say “I tackle such and such issue after finishing reading the Savage Detectives”

Why is Tinajero portrayed that way? Is she made up? Why does she die, and say not Madero or Lupe. What is the meaning between part two and three? Auto-fiction. Yes, this is a work of auto-fiction (perhaps exaggerated), but reading about adult decisions in part two, makes me think: change is the only constant. Free therapy. A layout of what other adults due in difficult experiences, even if fictional or exaggerated. I look an article of the Viscerealists. Now and then. To soothe my unhappiness as a young man, perhaps.

What’s outside my window? A star. Then nothing? A bird mistaken for a paperbag? to say, false hopelessness?

Why poetic when you can be analytical?

Then I want to say this is novel is also about disillusionment as it is about other themes. Like satire and replication, think of Pio Bajara’s story, La Sima. I look it up as it satirized (or replicated?) in a scene within Savage Detectives. Why do I feel attraction towards a text, towards a character, towards Ulises Lima and A. B., as well as Lupe and Garcia Madero? Is it OK to have crushes on many book characters from the same novel?

This is not therapy. but go on your analysis. 

Well, I wonder what will happen to Lupe and Garcia Madero. An unusual story. Will they end up together? The story has been sliced up here. For the reader to surmise.

How do you feel about Cesarea?

Desperately Seeking Susan.  I wonder if Belano or Bolano saw this film. Cesarea’s avatar, to me, is still Lilian Serpas’ real-life character. I think about the song: Into The Groove. And imagine Cesarea. I hope she was not real, that whatever happened in the novel did not happen to her. That she was not real. But after so much characterization, I think, It would be sad if she was not this real. To me, she seems real. I realize, there is an emotional bond now, between these characters and I.

What stands out most to you?

That in the novel, it is all realist. That they desire humanly, and suffer so. It is about human experiences.

And if you had to analyze it academically?

I would not. I would say that I loved the novel before much, that I loved Bolano’s other works. That I was introduced to his short stories at a young age, and having read a full-length novel by him was a different experience. That you have much to say, but it will stay with you. Until a word is uttered. That you haven’t decided whether you love or hate this novel – it certainly was something. That only Cesarea stays with you.

That I should open my windows, and ask myself, what’s outside my windows besides soil and pines?

I finished the book, and I really liked it. I love how it’s a huge puzzle, instead of a conventional plot with the “introduction, rising action, climax, denouement, resolution”. In fact it’s a huge puzzle missing many pieces – Bolaño doesn’t give us all the pieces. What do Belano and Lima talk about with Cesarea Tinajero? I instinctively want to call Cesarea Tinajero the MacGuffin, but would that reduce her significance?

When the visceral realists met the teacher who taught Papágo, which seems to be an indigenous language, it dawned on me that “savage” would have meant “indigenous” at the time this book was written. Cesárea was human in Part II, but in Part III she’s a mythical figure. A shapeshifter. At one point she was a coral snake, though this was the period when she was a loving teacher who registered the neglected children in elementary school and wanted to reform the education system. Later she looked like “a rock or an elephant”, which was when the visceral realists met her. She’s associated with another animal — the bull. It seemed like she identified with the matador world enough to inscribe her name on the tombstone of Avellaneda. Cesárea is also a trickster, because she leaves “jokes” for her followers to decode, which seem like they are not meant to have meaning attributed to them.

What did you make of the final poem? It looks like the window has melted, and I’m thinking of this window as the one separating trickster-Cesárea and the rest of us. She’s a transcendental figure. She can see the entire world while we have a very limited field of vision. She’s on the outside, giving vague messages to the people inside (among which only the poets are looking outwards and trying to decode). And one day this window melted away, and we face the entire world! The intemperie, the dangerous entire world that we were previously protected from by the window. But this reading leaves so many questions. Who put the window there? How did Cesárea get to the other side of the window? (I think she used to be on our side as well, back when she was with the stridentists.) And when does this window melt away? February 15, 1976? Or the day she wrote this? Or the day we read it (thus varying for each reader)? If it’s the day we read it, then for us readers, it’s the same day we finish and put down this book — which is an act very similar to the fall of a window and entry into another world — we are re-entering reality. But I really don’t want to read the inside of the window as illusion and the outside as ultimate reality, like some kind of Matrix situation. I don’t love the illusion-reality dichotomy. So, even after all this analysis, I come back to the question: what’s on the other side of the window? I must have fallen into trickster-Cesárea’s trap!

Another character caught my attention in this section — Alberto. Isn’t it crazy that a pimp goes all the way into the desert, for a month, to look for one girl – Lupe? This is not just an act of jealousy at this point. The night he talked and drank beer with Belano, Garcia Madero said “they looked like they’re friends,” and I believed that for a second! I thought: Alberto is looking for something too in this desert, something that has to do with his ideals, his beliefs. He’s looking for something important to him too, and Lupe is the symbol of whatever it is he’s searching for, just like Cesárea is the symbol of what the VR are searching for… Then the jerk pulled out his gun again. But this “friendly” moment is what started to change my perception of him. I want to read him as a character with depth too, rather than a simble vulgar bad guy, but I couldn’t come up with much, other than what I wrote above.

I realize I didn’t have as much to say about bullfighting as I would have liked, now my awesome blog title goes to waste. Aww.

Ahhh. This was the easiest that picking up Bolaño has been all semester. I’ll admit I’ve done most of my reading early Wednesday morning and late Wednesday night this semester (so that I can write my blog before midnight and work on things for my two other Thursday classes that are due in the morning afterwards). This ended up being the case this week as well. So I’ll say, having to read 50 pages after mowing through a few-hundred-or-so some weeks felt GREAT.

Thinking about Jasmine and David explaining how they explained The Savage Detectives to their friends, here’s how I would describe the road so far (did anyone watch Supernatural? lol):

“Juan García Madero joins the visceral realists, a poetry group in Mexico in the mid-1970s, where he meets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and bums around Mexico City for a while. Then, the three of them, plus a prostitute Lupe, end up in an Impala (Supernatural again?!) driving as fast as they can out of Mexico City to complete a double-headed quest: both escape Lupe’s cruel pimp Alberto and start a pilgrimage to find Cesárea Tinajero, touted as a figurehead of the visceral realist movement. Then, we skip over their journey, and hear from a vast collection of closely- or loosely-related acquaintances of stories.”

And now, Part III, the season finale if you will! Or maybe the second piece of sandwich bread if we think about Part II being a giant whopper of a sandwich – we’re looking at Scooby-Doo proportions here. Okay that’s enough random thoughts…

In Part III, we return to the first days of ’76 as García Madero, Lupe, Roberto and Ulises in Quim Font’s Impala driving out from Mexico City to escape Alberto and to find Cesárea Tinajero. I found Bolaño captured well the mundanity of a road trip, even one with life and death consequences, García Madero quizzing his friends on literary devices and his drawings of birds-eye-view sombreros. This had me thinking of how I spent time on road trips. I grew up in Vancouver but my family is from California (=American citizen, which we uncovered during one class. Not a point of pride) so I’ve spent a lot driving to California, which takes about two days. Plenty of time to pass: usually I read, zone out, or gossip with my mom – we usually have more to gossip about on the way home!

I enjoyed a literary reference I finally got! Hot on Cesárea’s tail (or rather, making something out of nothing), our searchers uncover Pepín Allevenada, a bullfighter, and refer to Hemingway’s sad matadors. I took an American literature class in my second year (uh no not American again) and we read In Our Time, which is a collection of short stories interspersed with little snippets of other stories, many of these of matadors – almost Part II-esque. Here’s a quote that felt Bolaño-esque about a bullfighter who had a poor fight:

“Afterwards I saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown face and quite drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I am not really a good bull-fighter” (p. 95).

Both aspects of the quest unite when the quartet find Cesárea and at the same time are found by Alberto. I was a little ambivalent about Cesárea’s death: on one hand, that’s sad both that she died for herself and also for the visceral realists, but at this point I was down for whatever Bolaño had written to get to the end. It felt like he was playing with his reader again though; all that just to have her die.

Going back to John v Ava on whether we like endings or not, I will yell it from the top of a hill that I am happy to have ended The Savage Detectives. My ritual of finishing a book: I put my bookmark in my bookmark tin, I mark it off as “Finished” on GoodReads, and then I decide if I want to keep the book or pawn it off to a local lending library. I think I would like to reread this book on my own time; having to cram it all in for late Wednesday nights was not optimal reading for me. But I’ll give it a year or two to simmer.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Even though I didn’t love this book, I did enjoy reading it.