Amulet was a really interesting look into themes of modern Latin American history for me, and I really enjoyed reading about Auxilio’s stories about the past and her eventual literary “history of the future,” from the lecture. The first few lines stuck with me for the entire part of the book that I’ve read, about how everything Auxilio said was a horror story. The lecture seemed to hint that this horror of history had to do with the “storms” and social issues surrounding Latin America as the generation of younger poets she hung around was slowly lost to them, including when students were taken away during the occupation of the UNAM.

The strange sense of time present in the novel stuck out to me initially; the narration supposedly takes place over a few days in September 1968, but Auxilio frequently alludes to the future when discussing events such as Arturo returning to Mexico in 1974 after helping overthrow Allende’s government. I thought that this memory of the future found meaning in commemoration, and she became an emblem or a witness of the military occupation specifically. It seemed like remembering was closely related to acknowledging to Lacouture, and acknowledging the future of that lost generation and of the literary world was to commemorate and honour how it would live on, seen from a bathroom of a building dedicated to just those ideals of change and literary excellence. Even after reading the lecture, I don’t fully understand how this temporality functions, but nonetheless, Lacouture’s depiction of Latin America through only her peripheral eyes in the bathroom, convincingly and beautifully shows how history itself can be a horror story.

Finally, the way Bolaño tackles narration was really interesting to me as well; the lecture mentioned that Auxilio lives on the periphery of the violence and revolution characterizing much of 20th-century Latin American history because the book rarely gave details of violence, but mainly relied on observations and indications that the occupation was happening. Both books by Spanish-speaking Latin American authors I read this term (Bombal and now Bolaño) have narrators who tend to take a peripheral view of the world; Ana Maria’s narration often highlighted Chile’s status in the world relative to Europe and the dominant social role of men in her life, and Lacouture sees the world from the periphery of the bathroom. As a result, I was wondering about whether a common theme in 20th century Latin American literature is this “peripheral” perspective and understanding of the world, as the region itself experienced revolution, development, and tumultuous political change when parts of Europe and English-speaking North America seemed to dictate the world order. I wanted to ask whether, based on other Latin American literature you’ve read, this sense of being peripheral comes up or reveals itself.