Monthly Archives: March 2022

Roberto Bolano, “Amulet”

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amulet (noun): a charm (such as an ornament) often inscribed with a magic incantation or symbol to aid the wearer or protect against evil (such as disease or witchcraft)

Amulet follows Auxilio Lacouture, a woman trapped in the women’s bathroom of a university while it is being taken over by the military in response to a student movement. Perhaps the most intriguing choice of this novel is how Bolano anchors the perspective in the women’s bathroom in 1968, where Auxilio is hiding, yet time and memory move both backward and forward as well. Auxilio, isolated in the women’s bathroom, cold and hungry, begins to see moments of the future. People enter Auxilio’s life and disappear, but are never truly forgotten.

One of the more intriguing characters is Arturito Belano, a Chilean poet who befriends Auxilio and later returns to Chile to take part in the revolution against Pinochet. When he returns, he is irrevocably changed by the horrors he has seen and experienced. Just like everyone else, Arturito disappears from Auxilio’s life, and she has no idea where he has gone.

I think memory and death are important themes in this book, but not in the way it was in say, Proust or Bombal. It’s not so much just about the memories of Auxilio herself, but her memories of an entire generation. The final chapter captures it most clearly:

“But what kind of love could they have known. I wondered when they were gone from the valley, leaving only their song resonating in my ears. The love of their parents, the love of their dogs and cats, the love of their toys, but above all the love, the desire and the pleasure they shared with one another.

And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.

And that song is our amulet.” (p.184)

Auxilio is the “mother of Mexican Poetry”, a protector and guardian. While she never physically protects any of her “children”, she does protect the memory of a generation. She is the mother of all the young poets. And it is a kind of courage of a generation that is being remembered and will protect others to come.

Bit of a shorter post this time. I have to say that this novel was a little bit confusing because of the perspective. Just like other novels in the course, time bends all over the place and there is lots of metaphysical imagery.

My question for this post would be: What is the “amulet” and what does it protect us from?

 

On Manea’s Guest Lecture

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Hearing from Professor Manea himself was a true honour. Such a deeply personal insight into the book through the lens of the author and his experience. After hearing about his life, about totalitarian Romania, about his exodus, it all made The Trenchcoat much clearer. I have to say though, even after knowing more about the context, I think my thoughts about the book have simultaneously changed but also been reinforced. The titular trenchcoat was an object that I wondered if it was allegorical or not. I ultimately concluded that no, it was not, or at least, the important thing is not the trenchcoat itself. Knowing it to be a representation of the Securitate and of informants, I stand by my view that it is not important what it represents. It’s not important whether there’s an actual informant in the midst. What matters is how it changes people, rooting a deep-seated paranoia and fear that’s waiting to bubble over. All it takes is one stray trenchcoat.

Anyway, a short little post just to reflect on Manea’s talk. I have to say that hearing his own story as a writer makes me more inspired to write myself. Evidently, it’s never too late to start!

Norman Manea, “The Trenchcoat”

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“What, what the… what the hell is it with that raincoat?” (p.253)

 

This story made much more sense when the context is explained in the lecture. I read the initial part blind and found myself thoroughly confused but also very tense and intrigued (in a good way); it conveyed an unnatural feeling that something was terribly wrong but everyone was putting up pretences. The dialogue is somewhat bizarre and the constant repetition and run-on makes for uncomfortable scenes even when it’s simply a mundane party. The stormy, dark weather that seems to drown out the surroundings only serves to make for an ominous backdrop and is punctuated by little references to totalitarian control. It makes so much more sense understanding the allegorical purpose; Don Bazil and his wife are so jittery and constantly putting up a front, and while the guests humour them they are not particularly satisfied. It is hollow. Farcical. A mere show, and no substance.

Later, after Dina’s calls about the mysterious trenchcoat inexplicably cease, Ali and the Kid (?) get into a heated discussion about Dina and the trenchcoat. The tension builds quickly as Ali gets increasingly frustrated, and it’s interesting to observe how delicately he beats around the bush. I wonder if this is Manea himself beating around the issue of censorship.

Over time I think the book becomes increasingly confusing, perhaps by design. It is all incredibly vague, yet poetic, and mysterious as well. Why is the unnamed One unnamed? What does the trenchcoat represent, if anything? Perhaps the trenchcoat is indeed just a trenchcoat. A meaningless object, but in a world teetering on the brink, even something so innocuous can spark such tension. Worth noting, I think, is that the trenchcoat is not just nondescript and anonymous, but sometimes isn’t even described correctly, often mistakenly referred to as a raincoat or overcoat instead. This leads me to believe the trenchcoat really isn’t anything of significance, and yet everyone treats it like something of significance. I think this only lends to the tension hanging in the air. Nobody is ever really sure of anything. But evidently there is a link between the unnamed One and the coat, and they both go by multiple, indistinct names too.

I wonder what the ending means. Time is personified as laughter, but described so poetically yet so abstractly.

I’m very much looking forward to listening to Manea in person. Overall, I admire Manea’s writing style a lot. Such interesting and unique ways of creating atmosphere and vagueness. I also find the title of the collection pretty interesting. “Compulsory Happiness”, as if there is not even the freedom to feel.

 

A general question: What is ‘ex’ supposed to represent? It is repeated a lot by the unnamed One, and later by Ioana at the end.

For Manea: What was it like having to work around the censor? How much of what you wanted to say was left unsaid, and do you think you said what you wanted to say better, in the way that you did?

 

“There’s something going on! There’s always something under the face, obviously. Obviously! Nothing is what it seems, nothing or no one, not even your own husband, no one! Anyone can become anything! Anyone, anytime, anything?” (p.257)

Georges Perec, “W, or the Memory of Childhood”

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Much like my post on Black Shack Alley, I will format my post according to the parts of the book. I’ll also be updating this as I move through each part before I do a brief concluding reflection at the end.

 

Reflection on Part I

Unfortunately, I do not have quite as much to say about this as I did with Black Shack Alley. Something that does stick out to me is that just like in Combray, nothing really happens for a long time. Georges meets with the mysterious Otto Apfelstahl, and simultaneously goes on a long reflection of his past and his family, especially his father, as well as several disjointed memories from his childhood and his adulthood (especially Chapter Eight, which is filled with passages that seem vaguely connected to one another but then bounce to something else). It does seem awfully interesting though. Georges is a refugee of the Holocaust in France, and lost his parents because of the war. However, because he was a child at the time of the war and fled to safety, the war only forms a distant backdrop in this part, while the main focus is on the patchy memories of his family and childhood – lots of use of “I think” when recalling memories, and lots of instances of him correcting himself based on his family’s accounts –  and the ongoing mystery of Gaspard Winckler. What I can find is that the memory of childhood is hazy indeed; we can only really remember little bits and reconstruct the rest using the memories of others – so how much is really the truth?

I also wonder why Georges agrees so readily to helping Otto in the search for Gaspard? I shall find out as I read on. (Note: I don’t.)

 

Reflection on Part II

Very confusingly, the parallel narrative shifts to one about the fictional island of W. I honestly do not understand what’s going on with W, and I find myself wishing to go back to the Gaspard story! I wonder how much is lost by translating into English from French?

I do find it interesting, having watched the lecture, how the island of W hides an authoritarian and horribly unjust system that not only perpetuate inequality and treats the losers brutally, but can also be extremely arbitrary (highlighted by the opening paragraph on p.117). Given the backdrop of WWII and the Holocaust, it reminds me of a course that I took on jurisprudence some time ago in my home university. In particular, my professor referred to a scene from the film Schindler’s List – while I haven’t seen the film and can’t recall the details of her explanation, the scene depicted people being arrested in Nazi Germany for crimes they did not even know about yet. This was meant to spark the question of whether unspoken law is law at all (“The Law must be known by all, but the Law cannot be known”). Fitting, then, that Perec chooses to illustrate the arbitrary injustice of the Nazis with this seemingly unrelated fiction.

In fact, as the barbarism of W is increasingly described, it is presented alongside a description of the fairly apathetic and ineffective Administration, which pays lip service to decrying various practices (such as trades) but makes no genuine effort to actually induce change. Indeed, they even seem to promote some of this barbarism at times, such as the peculiar scale of punishment for athletes who sneak into the women’s dormitories. A criticism of government?

The more I read about W, the more it makes me wonder if – or how – it is linked to the Holocaust. The brutality of it all; the apathy and cruelty of the Administration; the animalistic barbarism; the horror that the novices become privy to once they enter. In light of how Chapter Thirty ends, with some kind of optimism, I’m not terribly sure.

Chapter Thirty-Seven seems to give some confirmation, but it certainly gives me no answers!

 

Final Reflection

I didn’t really understand this novel. Unlike Proust, which had a clear trigger for his reminiscence, here I don’t see the connection between the various narratives taking place. What about Gaspard Winckler? What was the purpose of that short scene which spans the entire first part? What is the significance of W to Georges’s story, if there even is any? What is the point of Georges’s reflections to begin with? The various memories are strung along and alternate with the parallel narratives but doesn’t seem to tie together beyond being of Perec, the writer, and not the character. To me, this read more like a diary. I will admit though, that it was well written and often had me as hooked in as I was bored!

My question for this blog post is, therefore, why does Perec use the parallel narrative structure with multiple different narratives taking place at once?

One other thing I really want to discuss, but couldn’t understand, is the significance of Georges’s childhood memories. While I could gather some concepts and themes from W, and the part on Gaspard Winckler was too short to make much out of, the childhood memories take up such as large part of the book and yet I can’t really make anything of it.

I do have another thought about Gaspard Winckler. I still wonder why he is even in the book at all. Is he a victim of tragedy conveniently forgotten in place of something bigger, more “important”?

 

Some Quotes

p. 12: “However, childhood is neither longing nor terror, neither a paradise lost nor the Golden Fleece, but maybe it is a horizon, a point of
departure, a set of co-ordinates from which the axes of my life may draw their meaning.”

p. 42: ” I am not writing in order to say that I shall say nothing, I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I
write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.”

p. 68-69: “What marks this period especially is the absence of landmarks: these memories are scraps of life snatched from the void. No mooring. Nothing to anchor them or hold them down. Almost no way of ratifying them. No sequence in time, except as I have reconstructed it arbitrarily over the years: time went by. There were seasons. There was skiing and haymaking. No beginning, no end. There was no past,
and for very many years there was no future either; things simply went on. You were there.”

p. 117: “As you begin to acquaint yourself with W life, as a novice, for instance, who has moved from the Youth Homes to one of the
four villages at the age of fourteen, you soon grasp that one, and perhaps the main, feature of the world that is your world from now on is that its institutions are harsh and inflexible to an extent matched only by the vast scope of the rule-bending that goes on in them. This realization, which is one of the things which determine a newcomer’s personal safety, is consistently borne out, at all levels, at every moment. The Law is implacable, but the Law is unpredictable. The Law must be known by all, but the Law cannot be known. Between those who live under its sway and those who pronounce it stands an insurmountable barrier.”

p. 139-140: “Thus ends the novice’s first day. The following days will be spent in the same way. To begin with he does not grasp. Novices a
little more senior than he sometimes try to explain, to tell him what goes on, how things work, what he must do and what he mustn’t do. But usually they can’t do it. How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of?”

p. 145: “Each time, Henri expressed surprise that this outburst of adolescent anger had made such an impression on me: it seems to me, however, that what I deduced from this unbelievable act was not that Henri was just a child, but rather, more darkly, that he was not, was no longer, the infallible being, the model, the repository of knowledge and the dispenser of certainty which he of all people simply had to remain for me.” (I like this quote; it doesn’t have any particular significance to me but I just like how it was written)

p. 159: “The life of an Athlete of W is but a single, endless, furious striving, a pointless, debilitating pursuit of that unreal instant when triumph can bring rest.”

p. 160: “There are two worlds, the world of the Masters and the world of slaves. The Masters are unreachable, and the slaves tear at each other. But an Athlete of W does not even know that. He would rather believe in his Star. He waits for luck to smile on him.”

 

 

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