Amulet (novel)

Amulet is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 1999. An English translation, by Chris Andrews, was published by New Directions in 2006.

Plot summary

Amulet embodies in one woman’s voice the melancholy and violent history of Latin America.

It begins: “This is going to be a horror story.” The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, known as the “Mother of Mexican Poetry”. Tall, thin, and blonde, she becomes famous as the sole person who resists the army’s 1968 invasion of the university during the now infamous Tlatelolco massacre—she hides in a women's toilet for twelve days. As she tries to outlast the occupiers and grows ever hungrier, Auxilio recalls her life, her lost teeth, her beloved friends and poets, and she soon moves on to strange landscapes: ice-bound mountains, seedy bars in “the dark night of the soul of Mexico City,” a terrifying chasm, and a bathroom where moonlight shines, moving slowly from tile to tile.

Auxilio is also featured in The Savage Detectives, where she narrates her stay in the restroom of the besieged university. However, as Francisco Goldman has noted, Amulet "sings an enthralling and haunting ode to youth, life on the margins, poetry and poets, and Mexico City. Much more than a companion piece to The Savage Detectives - it shares some of the same characters - Amulet may be Bolaño's most autobiographical book. Formally and verbally, it also represents some of his most innovative and thrilling writing."

External links

• "Found in Translation" by Aura Estada, Boston Review, July, 2007
• "Amulet by Robeto Bolaño" Bookslut, March, 2007
• "Robeto Bolaño's Lost Boys" by Benjanin Lytal, New York Sun, January 17, 2007
• "Amulet by Roberto Bolaño" by Scott Bryan Wilson, The Quarterly Conversation, Spring, 2007