RMST 495/520: Long Books

Hi everyone, likewise to what I have read from everyone else’s posts so far on Amulet by Roberto Bolańo, it is kind of hard for me to pinpoint how I feel about the book. I don’t think I loved the book, but it did leave me a lot to think about. One of the main takeaways for me from Amulet was the construct of time. Bolańo’s construction and deconstruction of time is also very prevalent in The Savage Detectives, but I will come back to more of my thoughts on time later on.

First, I want to touch on Auxilio as a character and why I think she is very powerful agent in her own story, as well as in other people’s lives as well. She notes that she lives somewhat of a nomad lifestyle where she never really stays in one place for too long, I don’t think it can be denied that she makes lasting connections with the people she meets and generally has a positive impact on them. Moreover, I appreciate her personality because I think there is an unapologetic attitude to her that I find admirable. For example, her friendship with Elena highlighted her undeniable ability to make friends anywhere. She mentioned how Elena would always talk about how philosophy and theatre were closely related. Even though they don’t seem to have very similar interests or personalities, Auxilio finds a common ground with her, and when she goes missing for awhile, she makes it her mission to find where Elena went, and goes as far to get her home address from the faculty. Maybe one could argue she was so concerned for selfish reasons, for companionship or looking for someone to stay with, but there is no explicit mention of her staying with Elena and based on my reading, Auxilio puts a lot of her soul into her relationships which is why she always shows a level of care. On page 43, Auxilio states she never lost her humour, which is another part of her personality that shines throughout the book. From her viewpoint, even the bleakest moments can have some humour, like when she jokes about UNAM with Arturo’s mother. It is aspirational to be resilient to the point where you can allow positivity to infect even the most tragic or upsetting realities.

Back to my thoughts on time in this book, the way Auxilio frames time, claiming she sees events that happen in the future far decades ago. On page 31, she states “The birth was over” when she is recalling what happened when she stayed in the bathroom stalls when the soldiers left. This really stuck out to me for a couple of reasons. First, we obviously know this is not her actual birth, because she is an adult woman. But similarly to García Madero with being introduced to visceral realism/realists, this was a definitive moment that felt like birth. We don’t remember being born because we are newborn babies, but with monumental moments like what happened in UNAM, our memories, cognition and perspective are able to actually comprehend what birth means, and then we prescribe our birth to something else besides the actual act of being born. My personal opinion, Auxilio’s birth is much more significant than García Madero’s if we had to judge from an objective standpoint, but I get that the value assigned to these life changing events is personal, I’m just being a bit of a hater.

Overall, I really enjoyed the element of time in this book, as well as the balancing of bleakness and random tidbits of her bohemian life.

The first two lines of Amulet that I read were the first, as I opened the book, and the last, as I flipped to see how many pages I should pace myself for each day this week: “This is going to be a horror story” (p. 1) and “And that song is our amulet” (p. 184). Very intriguing! I don’t feel like they are connected, but I look forward to finding out.

As I read, I recognized lines, passages and ideas from Part II of the Savage Detectives – like when Auxilio berates herself for forgetting her paper supply in the bathroom, or Arturo Belano returning from Chile after the coup. It really does read like an extra chapter, and, since Auxilio’s voice and story were the most appealing to me from Part II, I was excited to learn more.

What initially captured my attention was the writing style, which kept me reading through events and narratives that for the most part I did not find inspiring. I love the descriptions and use of language: “Let me stretch time out like a plastic surgeon stretching the skin of a patient under anaesthesia” (p. 2), the possibilities of a Pandora’s Box-like vase, how the younger generation of poets make her shudder, “as if they weren’t creatures of flesh and blood but a generation spring from the open wound of Tlatelolco” (p. 77), “Then the moon changed tiles” (p. 168). I love the little details all throughout the text, like a silver frog or Mexican feline lineage, which, though we might consider these as what makes a long story long, I find fit in here much more easily than little details would in the Savage Detectives. I cannot quite put my finger on why: perhaps the narrator.

Two themes I found interesting are temporality and companions. I enjoyed the use of temporality in the novel, the 13 days being measured from moonlight on tile – two images found on the cover of my edition. The moon is mentioned so often throughout the book that it evokes the idea of a companion during Auxilio’s isolation. Reading is another companion for Auxilio, “I knew that I had to resist,” (p. 32) she explains, turning to her book of poetry as the companion to resistance. For a question relating to a major theme in class, how can reading be a form of resistance? What is the difference between resistance as an author versus as a reader?

For these reasons I did enjoy reading Amulet, but honestly, I don’t feel like I got that much out of it. Maybe I would have found it more impactful without having read the Savage Detectives, but I found it to be about characters that I did not really care too much about, and too flighty/loose/airy (I really cannot find the right adjective!) to ground me in the solid reality of the horror of being trapped in Auxilio’s situation.

As for the opening and concluding sentences, I suppose being isolated in fear in a washroom for days on end is a horror story. I find in the children singing a protective song in the end evokes the ideas of what the university students were pushing for: reform and resistance.

Thank you for reading!

I find myself struggling to know what to write about this week’s reading. This was one of those books that I’ll finish and probably not really think about again (besides our incoming class discussion). I neither loved nor hated it. I don’t really feel any particular way about Amulet, I just read it and now it’s over. I did like the prose, and I enjoyed the slightly more bouncy(?) writing/narration style to what we see in The Savage Detectives. By bouncy, I mean like:

Where maybe your most straightforward non-nonsense author (maybe an author really into historical accuracy) might tell the story like the black line, our narrator’s voice is the pink, where everything is a “yes, but…” or a “maybe, while also…”

I found love to be a strong theme throughout the chapters, a love of poetry, of Mexico, of young poets, of language and words and slang, of her friends, and of storytelling.

I also thought a lot about Poulet’s writing on the phenomenology of reading as I was reading. The narrator talks about how much she loves the poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfías, and while she says she worked with them in Mexico before they died, it’s unclear how much of her “knowing” poets is from meeting them versus reading their poetry. It’s Garfías’ poems she’s reading in the bathroom when UNAM was seized, and she then spirals into her stories about various poets she knew. In reading Garfías’ words in this scene, it’s like a part of him (as author) was with her (as reader) in the bathroom stall; her act of reading inspiring the literature to become “a sort of human being,” and linking “a common consciousness with the reader” (Poulet 59).

One idea I underlined to share this week was her mediation on movement towards the east: “To where night comes from. But then I thought: It’s also where the sun comes from” (Bolaño 54). I have never thought about the night coming from the east, because I guess I’ve always been so fixated on the sun setting in the west.

Then, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts about who the narration is for. When the narrator says “you” (like “I still have to tell you about her”) (41), is she speaking to a generally undefined audience, as in everyone who reads the book, or is she addressing it to something/one more defined (like the young poets she loves and mentors)?

First major reaction:

I can’t believe I finished Amulet in four sittings across the weekend! There’s something almost compelling about this short novel by  Bolaño. With this book, I felt that pull from the first few pages, and I kept turning pages, curious about where Auxilio Lacouture’s mind would take me next, page after page. Every moment I read, whether on transit, waiting for my laundry to finish, or in brief breaks between other tasks, I notice how normal my day-to-day moments feel compared to the intensive experiences of Auxilio’s. Waiting for my laundry to finish, I would sit on a sofa, book in hand, and suddenly an hour felt like minutes!

Interesting Points in the Novel

What I found most fascinating was how time seems to exist differently in Auxilio’s world. It doesn’t flow in a simple linear line; rather, it stretches, folds, and loops back on itself. One moment she’s in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Philosophy and Literature faculty at UNAM, the next she’s recalling events in Tlatelolco, and then imagining futures or alternate realities. Time in Amulet feels living, changing and expanding, almost like something Auxilio carries with her, shaping her perception and the narrative itself: Auxilio’s narrative world appears like a piece of history, an obsession, and a dream. I would say that Amulet is disorienting at times, contradictory and dreamlike, yet it somehow works and stays as an interesting read. Reading it, I kept asking myself: what would you hold onto in a world that dismantles your sense of time, memory and rationalization after staying locked in a bathroom in fear for your life? For me, Auxilio’s story is on resilience, memory, and being present in a moment that’s larger than oneself, and to imagine and escape into a world when facing fear and danger.

Moreover, there’s the lyrical quality of Bolaño’s writing. Certain passages stayed with me long after I read them. I kept thinking about one description of happiness, where Auxilio reflects on looking at herself in mirrors when she senses joy. Small details like this, or the way she meets Arturo Belano in 1970 (coincidentally, his age matches Bolaño’s own), made me curious about the metafiction connections between Bolaño’s two novels and between fiction and the author’s life.

Discussion Question:

So, I leave the question to you: what intrigued you the most in this novel? Did you find yourself drawn into its dreamlike patterns, or did you prefer the sprawling adventure of The Savage Detectives?

From my point of view, I found myself completely drawn into the dreamlike patterns of Amulet. Something is mesmerizing about how time stretches and folds around Auxilio, how past, present, and daresay fantasy collide in her washroom refuge. While I appreciate the sprawling, energetic adventure of The Savage Detectives, with its many voices and chaotic momentum, I think what captivated me in Amulet was how Bolaño compresses historical backdrop into a lyrical, almost hallucinatory experience during the reading.

No catchy title here folks! All my previous blog posts simply are titled with the title of the book, the part of the book, and the corresponding page numbers. I kind of felt an obligation to come up with a catchy title since this week’s reading was the entirety of the short novel, Amulet, but I decided to keep it consistent and every title that I was thinking of kind of fell short. Let’s actually talk about titles a bit! I feel like they have to be short (obviously) yet they have to capture the essence of the work (be it a book, movie, blog post, etc.). Most importantly though, titles have to capture the reader’s attention/curiosity because it’s really the very first impression that they get of the work. In the case of The Savage Detectives, I’ve seen some discussion floating around about the significance of the title, personally I’m not 100% sure yet, but I’m guessing we’ll figure it out soon enough (perhaps it’s the group of Belano, Lima, García Madero, and Lupe who have gone North to do who knows what). In the case of 2666, it’s actually pretty interesting because just from reading 2666, I had not a clue of the significance of its title. However, thanks to Amulet, there’s actually a mention of 2666 in this line: “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.” (86) Now I would love to discuss this further on its significance to the book 2666 but let me not stray too far since this is supposed to be a blog post about Amulet, not The Savage Detectives or 2666.

Anyways, in the case of Amulet, I really loved the title and the symbolism of the amulet at the end as a song of hope and love for the young generation of Latin Americans encompassing “youth and valor…violence and exile…memory and history” (Bolaño) (I’m actually not sure how exactly to cite the blurb on the back of books). I thought that this was an excellent ending to this short novel and I found the last couple chapters of Auxilio’s visions sort of fantastical or dreamlike, which I enjoyed. When I say “fantastical” or “dreamlike”, I don’t mean to downplay the student movement and massacre in Mexico, but I think it perfectly reflects Auxilio’s intended narrative. The very first lines of this short novel begin with: “This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller.” (1) Rather than hiding the horror, Auxilio, or I guess deep down Bolaño, is framing it through their own poetic lens. Not just as a cold part of history, but instead as a memorable song of resistance, their amulet.

Now for some more general thoughts and impressions I had of Amulet. To be completely honest, I thought it was only okay. I didn’t love it but nor did I hate it. I definitely enjoyed reading certain portions of the book, especially the chapter where they confronted the King of the Rent Boys. I also liked Coffeen’s recount of Orestes and Erigone. However, in classic Bolaño fashion, there are tons of shorter stories within the larger story, some of which I just straight up didn’t find myself enjoying reading. For example, even perhaps the most important one of Auxilio being stuck in the washroom didn’t really interest me. Perhaps that’s due to the point made earlier on how Auxilio is not trying to frame it as a horror story. Additionally, I don’t think I’m quite the target audience that would really get a lot out of reading Amulet. Hell, a few blogs ago I mentioned that I wasn’t really familiar with the Mexican student movement to begin with. On another note though, as someone basically just reading Bolaño this term, I felt that his tone or maybe style of writing in Amulet felt more “lyrical” or at least more similar to his poetry than his other long books (maybe it’s because he’s writing through Auxilio, maybe because it’s a short book, or maybe even because it’s a different translator). But again, if I am to be completely honest once more, I kind of enjoy Bolaño’s writing in his books than his poetry (at least from his poetry we’ve read in class). So, my question to you all this week is: “Do you find any difference in Bolaño’s style of writing between Amulet and The Savage Detectives? If so, which one do you prefer? And what about his poetry?” I know that for the last question a couple of us have already shared our thoughts in class, but I’d like to know what more people have to say!

P.S. I really liked the cover of this Picador edition, so shoutout Michael Schmelling and Mike Adams (the cover designer and illustrator)!

The “King of the Rent Boys” episode was one of the few parts of Amulet that I recalled semi-clearly from my first read through, and I kept wondering when I would get to it. The section during which this encounter takes place reads like a fairytale to me. Maybe it’s because of how Auxilio describes the key scene in Colonia Guerrero, or maybe it’s the way that Ernesto and Arturo are said to behave leading up to and following the confrontation; or maybe it’s both. I think the fact that they rescue the sick boy, Juan de Dios Montes, also contributes to this impression: Auxilio’s narration of the section ends with, “Our hidden purpose had been to stop him from being killed” (Bolaño 103).

Overall, I enjoyed my second reading of Amulet. At times, Auxilio Lacouture sort of reminded me of Juan García Madero from The Savage Detectives, but it was in a way that held my attention, not in a way that made me cringe. Also, whereas Juan García Madero‘s narration makes me feel a little like I’m being forced to follow him around and observe what he gets up to, Auxilio’s narration seemed to carry me.

What did make me cringe a little bit was Auxilio’s encounter with the son of Lilian Serpas, Carlos Coffeen Serpas. I think moments of their interaction were just so viscerally (ha ha) awkward to me, even if Auxilio herself didn’t necessarily feel that way. I also really wanted to know what it was that she was connecting between the story of Cronus and the story of Erigone (assuming there was, in fact, something). Then again, maybe it was the feeling that was the important thing; if so, it certainly made an impression.

On the subject of the materiality of the book, I feel obligated to report that I have had some minor mishaps with my copy of Amulet over the last week: first, I managed to get it wet; then, I placed the damp book too close to my heater, and the plastic on the cover started to warp. The pages are mostly dry now, but they sort of look like the gills of a mushroom.

For my questions of the week (to be taken as seriously or as unseriously as you like): What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to a physical book? What’s the worst thing a book has ever done to you?

(My answers: 1. Probably what I did to Amulet this week. 2. Les Misérables tried to crush my ribs.)

First off, I can’t believe I finished a whole book in one sitting, in one day. Going back to our in class discussion on Thursday on why short books are short, one of the reasons we came up with was the satisfaction that it gives the readers, that they are able to finish the book faster and this gives readers a sense of achievement, making them more attracted to shorter books. That’s why they prefer reading shorter books, perhaps a marketing strategy that appeals to readers’ desire for quick success. I definitely felt that way.

The book was definitely successful at keeping me hooked and reading Bolaño, and not being confused is a great feeling/achievement. I feel like I learned a thing or two from reading this book, or perhaps some ideas were reinforced for me through Auxilio Lacoutune’s narrative. The notion of resilience in particular. Also, I truly admire how she simply wanted to be around Felipe and Pedro Garfías to learn from them, as she held them in high regard. That to me is so incredible: learning from people you admire by being in their presence.

My favourite pages were pages 4, 114, 136, 167-169, and 184 (Is it weird that I have favourite pages?). One part of the text truly stayed with me. I found myself reading it over and over. Auxilio says as she was hallucinating about Remedios Varo:

“and when you’re happy or sense that happiness may be imminent, you’re not afraid to look at yourself in mirrors, indeed, when you’re happy or feel predestined for happiness, you tend to lower your guard and face up to mirrors, out of curiosity, I guess, or because you’re feeling good in your skin” (p. 136)

If you remember, I raised the idea that Arturo Belano was Roberto Bolaño in The Savage Detectives. Well, yes, we know it is not him, but a representation of him in the story? I never gave up on that, and as I was reading Amulet, I noticed something. We know that Roberto Bolaño was born in 1953. When Auxilio meets Arturo Belano in 1970 she tells us that he is 16-17 years old and 1970-1953=17!!! It may be irrelevant, but I find it so interesting to make these connections and explore them further.

She jumps back and forth between the future, hypothetical scenarios, and the past while she is stuck in the bathroom on the fourth floor of the faculty of philosophy and literature at the UNAM. I appreciate that I could distinguish what was perhaps a hallucination and what had actually happened before. I also think Amulet should be recommended to anyone reading The Savage Detectives, especially to learn more about who Arturo is and his past.

My question for you is: what was your favourite part/aspect of the book? also, would you say you enjoyed reading Amulet more or The Savage Detectives (so far)?

Annabelle mentioned in a previous blog post that the first part of The Savage Detectives reminds her of Catcher in the Rye, in which the most poetic and surrealist episode being when Holden imagines children running to the end of a field of rye, and himself catching them before they fall of the cliff. Amulet ends in a similar surrealist episode, where Auxilio watches young Latin Americans, “ghost-children”, enveloped in compassion, march off together towards death. And unlike Holden, Auxilio in her own vision is unable to save them. She could only scream into oblivion.

Suddenly I realize I’m not sure what this vision is. How did we (the readers) end up in this valley? This is one question that came up to me repeatedly over the reading. Auxilio’s narration has very strange transitions. Her narration sometimes has a liquid quality. It has some distinct episodes, but each seem to slide into the next. For example, she visits the Catalan painter, then suddenly she’s watching Lilian Serpas sell her son’s paintings. What happens in the 10 years(?) between these two events is masked with a dreamy transition of Lilian walking out of Remedios Varo’s house. I don’t believe this is what happened. In any case, I realized a page later that we are in a different episode now. I hadn’t realized when or if the previous episode ended already. It almost gives the reader a ghost-like presence in the narrative, and we flow through the life of Auxilio. The chapters are NOT to be trusted! The ends of the episodes are not always the end of a chapter. I found the reading experience to be very different from The Savage Detectives, in which most episodes are one section, clearly distinguishable from the formatting of the text and the headings on the information of the author. The book is short, but I took a very long time to read the end, because I often had to reread passages of the valley dream.

Do you also find the fluid episodes confusing, and sometimes wonder “how did I get here” when you read Amulet? In which episodes (if you remember)?

Many things seem to have a fluid quality in this book, especially all the shadows and ghosts that never left Auxilio’s Mexico City night sky. She says she sometimes finds in her poet friends the spirit of all the Latin American children who died. She doesn’t say Mexican or Uruguayan, but Latin American, which leads me to believe that her coming to Mexico and trying to live on nothing, to survive the worst possible situations, is a project of proving her resilience or vivacity. This is her Hero’s Quest. She’s always telling herself: resist. Again, literature is a MacGuffin in the story. I believe Auxilio is more interested in the resilience and the vivacity of Latin America. She looks for it in the younger generation (which is where I’d look too). We discussed the Lukács “hero” as a collective effort, but I feel that Auxilio’s quest is so different from the Visceral Realists’ that Bolaño needed to write an entire book to explain the complexity of her quest. Auxilio functions more as a symbol in The Savage Detectives, and doesn’t really have a quest.

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.