Roberto Bolano’s Amulet was an interesting read particularly because of the way its central motifs interact with one another in a way that feels very natural. On the one hand, the narrative is centrally concerned with time, however its dissection of time is not one of some objective or empirical account of time’s nature, rather the way that time is subjectively experienced by an individual, as well as the way that one’s perception may inform the temporal perceptions of others and the histories they share. Our protagonist Auxilio Lacouture, in a pivotal scene in which riot police storm her university as she sits helplessly in a bathroom stall, describes the moment not just of surviving for her own life’s sake but surviving because she may be the sole arbiter of this moment, a living testament to the reality she experienced in that moment. However, as Auxilio readily admits, her memory of events passed is not photographic and many of the details that surround her life are either obscured through the fragmentation of her memory or have become dissolved into similar memories of different years, such that much of the narrative is framed as though Auxilio is half-remembering and half-conjuring the details of her story. While admittedly the novel’s prose is often times tedious in how mundane it is, it is successful in that it presents the narrative as if Auxilio was simply recounting events passed. Minor details are rarely embellished and there are extended passages in which our narrator simply recounts what she was doing in the past, however the embellishments are reserved for particularly salient memories, much as many of us are likely to think of salient memories in hyperbole and metaphor.

Auxilio’s memories do not serve simply as the slightly fractured recounting of one’s life however, as she frequently reminds us that she is, in a sense, the matriarch of Mexican poetry. She has many friendships and relationships throughout the course of the narrative, each with a particular observational element in which Auxilio sits and observes her friends and their surroundings, encoding them not only into her memory, but conjuring up a memory of a future yet to come. This makes her initial assertion of needing to survive in order to recount what had happened on the day the university was infested by police not just something for her own sake, but that her memories exist to inform the future as well.

My question for the class is what do you think of the way our narrator Auxilio recounts the story in terms of her memories? what are your thoughts on her misremembering some events and how do you think that impacts the narrative?