Roberto Bolaño – Amulet

In Amulet, we find a Chilean author writing about a fictional Uruguayan protagonist based in Mexico. I felt that this captured the idea of the “romance world” not being restricted to any one specific geography very well.

As we progress in the book, we find that Auxilio, the protagonist, is stuck in a bathroom of UNAM. The book is a mixture of her accounts of the past and musings of the future while she waits in the bathroom while the rest of the university is occupied by soldiers. She is unsure how long she has been “shut up in the bathroom”. This idle time leads to reflections on life that provide us with a glimpse into the multidimensional life of Auxilio. There are things she seems to be proud of, such as claiming at multiple points that she is the “mother of Mexican poetry”. At the same time, we see an uncertain (and somewhat vulnerable) side of hers too where she is questioning her emotions and doubting herself – “It makes me want to cry! Am I crying? I saw it all and yet I didn’t see a thing. Am I making any sense?”

I loved the paradox in the setting Bolaño paints for us. Auxilio is in the middle of where the conflict is brewing, yet she is distanced from it, hiding in a corner. Is she a part of the chaos – by virtue of being at the geographic epicentre – or is she better understood as being an observer?

I particularly liked the second to last paragraph before the secretary comes and finds Auxilio. I think this paragraph captures the contradictions in Auxilio’s thoughts, combined with a sense of despair from being in hiding for so many days, very well. This is when Auxilio says “I thought, because I wrote, I endured”. At the same time, she muses about the vanity of writing in her situation, of writing on pieces of toilet paper. Then she goes on to say that two things go together: “writing and destroying, hiding and being found”. I interpreted this line as being about a beginning and an end. About events coming to a conclusion. Soon after, she is found in the bathroom. Is being found a conclusion to hiding (i.e., not being found) for so many days.

Amulet reflects the recurring theme of the texts we have read so far – of memories and nostalgia that may or may not be true, combined with a dash of musings, of both the past and future. The reader is at liberty of believing or not believing. All this results in narrators who are somewhat unreliable. The most unreliable of all seems to have been Proust in Combray, where (real) memories and dreams blended together. Bolaño in Amulet, in contrast, talks about fewer dreams but the memories and facts are still uncertain and unreliable. Another commonality is the detail with which the narrator tries to explain a memory, in spite of it being an uncertain memory.