Book Review | Amulet

For the adventurous reader who wants to go beyond British and American authors, a whole world of contemporary literature in English translation is waiting to be explored. Recently I discovered Roberto Bolano, hailed as the most exciting writer to come from South America in recent times. Susan Sontag, in The Times Literary Supplement, described him as 'the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world'.

I came to his novels indirectly, for my first access to this writer was through poetry. I had read a short, haunting book of Bolano's poems in a bilingual edition, called The Romantic Dogs (how can one resist the appeal of such a title?). Bolano considered himself a poet above all else and confessed that he turned to fiction as a means to support his wife and child, however the novels were to strike a more vibrant chord in the imagination of his readers.

Born in 1953 in Santiago, Chile, Bolano wrote poetry for most of his life while living in Mexico and Spain. His prose fiction was mainly written in the last decade of his short life - he died in 2003 at the age of 50. Amulet, ably translated by Chris Andrews, is probably his most accessible work where in only 184 pages we encounter some of Bolano's most beautiful writing: dreamy images, poetic and haunting.

Bolano descends from a direct line from Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and yet he is also something else. He hated being called an exponent of magical realism or a realist. Perhaps the best description of Bolano is that of a poet writing about the brutal political system of Latin America.

In this book, the narrator is Auxilio, a woman originally from Montevideo, who in the 60s is living in Mexico.  Calling herself the 'Mother of Mexican Poets', she carried out odd jobs for various poets, many of them living in exile in Mexico City, while mixing with many other young intellectuals, students and artists. On October 2, 1968, she happened to be in the women's toilets on the fourth floor of the Philosophy and Literature Building of the National Autonomous Mexican University in Mexico City, and this is where she hides in terror as a massacre of students is carried out by the army. Here she stays for twelve days, cowering in great fear and to keep her sanity she recounts a monologue of past and future encounters with both real and fictional characters.

It is her love for poetry which helps her cope with the violence taking place around her. In lyrical prophecies, dreams and hallucinations, Auxilio pays tribute to a host of characters, real and not so real, that include the Spanish poets Leon Felipe and Pedro Garfias, who lived in exile along with other artists and intellectuals in Mexico City, the surrealist Catalan painter Remedios Varo, the Salvadorian poet Lilian Serpas and many others including a young poet called Arturo Belano (the alter ego of Roberto Bolano).

The year 1968 was the year of protests worldwide organised mainly by students and workers. It became known as the Year of the Barricades. We read much about what was happening in France and other parts of Europe, including communist states like Czechoslovakia and in the US, but little is known about the massacre which took place in Mexico City.

On October 2, 1968, students mainly from the National Autonomous University gathered for a peaceful protest in Plaza de Tlatelolco, Mexico City, demanding a more open democratic ruling party. The army opened fire and killed at least 300 people while hundreds more were injured and arrested.

'This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror.  But it won't appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me it won't seem like that.' This is how Auxilio starts her monologue and sure enough, Roberto Bolano never refers directly to the massacre. Instead we have lyrical, poetic images all through the book.

Amulet is not a novel in the conventional sense, and as such it may not appeal to some readers. But this is a spirited, highly readable book, and it contains some of Bolano's most beautiful writing. In the final passage of the book this is how Auxilio describes seeing 'the prettiest children of Latin America, the ill-fed and the well-fed children, those who have everything and those who had nothing... working unstoppably towards the abyss... Then I heard a murmur... they were singing... and although the song was about war, about a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice... that song was our amulet.' This is a haunting, evocative book, and it's well worth reading.