Roberto Bolano’s Amulet was an interesting read particularly because of the way its central motifs interact with one another in a way that feels very natural. On the one hand, the narrative is centrally concerned with time, however its dissection of time is not one of some objective or empirical account of time’s nature, rather […]
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with Chile, future, history, latin america, memories, memory, Mexico, Poetry
Amulet opens with: “This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror” (1). This explanation by the narrator, Auxilio Lacouture, created, right off the bat, a sense of suspense and mystery that allowed readers to expect an exciting or thrilling story. However, in my opinion, the novel was the …
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with entrapment, history, memories, sleepwalking
This week, I read ‘Amulet’ by Roberto Bolano.
I found the first paragraph of the story interesting. The narrator started off by telling the readers that this story “…is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it wont appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that. Although, in fact, it’s a story of a terrible crime” (p 1). I never read a story that started off by telling what kind of story it will be, so it grabbed my attention and made me want to continue to read it. After reading the first paragraph, I was preparing myself for a violent story or the memories/fights of the war. However, the story was about a woman, Auxilio Lacouture, who was locked inside a washroom alone “..from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of September”(p 172). Specifically, the fourth floor washroom in the faculty of Philosophy and Literature building at the National Autonomous University (p 22). Due to the invasion of the army, the narrator locked herself inside the washroom for 12 days. With the terrifying situation outside, she tends to deal with her fear by looking back on her memories.
One of the most vivid moments to me was: when she was hiding in a stall, a soldier opened the washroom door and walked in. The detailed description of what had happened and what she was feeling makes me super nervous about what is going to happen. It felt as if I was hiding with her as well.
I like how the narrator described things, events, and people in detail. I noticed the narrator uses a lot of similes and metaphors to describe those. The detailed descriptions helped me imagine and picture the scenes in my head. Another thing I like is that the narrator used brackets/side notes to express her ‘inner feelings’.“…I became a bat, I left the university and wandered around Mexico city like a wraith (I can’t in all honesty say like a fairy, although I would like to) and drank and talked and attended literary gatherings (I knew where to find them all) ” (p20). The inner thoughts make me feel’ closer’ to the narrator as I am able to know more about her ‘inner’ feelings.
After Auxilio saw soldiers, tanks and riot police outside of the window, she went back to the washroom. That brings it to my question for the class: If you were in Auxilio’s situation, what would you do? Would you go back to the washroom and stay there or go somewhere else?
This week, I read ‘Amulet’ by Roberto Bolano.
I found the first paragraph of the story interesting. The narrator started off by telling the readers that this story “…is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it wont appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that. Although, in fact, it’s a story of a terrible crime” (p 1). I never read a story that started off by telling what kind of story it will be, so it grabbed my attention and made me want to continue to read it. After reading the first paragraph, I was preparing myself for a violent story or the memories/fights of the war. However, the story was about a woman, Auxilio Lacouture, who was locked inside a washroom alone “..from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of September”(p 172). Specifically, the fourth floor washroom in the faculty of Philosophy and Literature building at the National Autonomous University (p 22). Due to the invasion of the army, the narrator locked herself inside the washroom for 12 days. With the terrifying situation outside, she tends to deal with her fear by looking back on her memories.
One of the most vivid moments to me was: when she was hiding in a stall, a soldier opened the washroom door and walked in. The detailed description of what had happened and what she was feeling makes me super nervous about what is going to happen. It felt as if I was hiding with her as well.
I like how the narrator described things, events, and people in detail. I noticed the narrator uses a lot of similes and metaphors to describe those. The detailed descriptions helped me imagine and picture the scenes in my head. Another thing I like is that the narrator used brackets/side notes to express her ‘inner feelings’.“…I became a bat, I left the university and wandered around Mexico city like a wraith (I can’t in all honesty say like a fairy, although I would like to) and drank and talked and attended literary gatherings (I knew where to find them all) ” (p20). The inner thoughts make me feel’ closer’ to the narrator as I am able to know more about her ‘inner’ feelings.
After Auxilio saw soldiers, tanks and riot police outside of the window, she went back to the washroom. That brings it to my question for the class: If you were in Auxilio’s situation, what would you do? Would you go back to the washroom and stay there or go somewhere else?
This week, I read ‘Amulet’ by Roberto Bolano.
I found the first paragraph of the story interesting. The narrator started off by telling the readers that this story “…is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it wont appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that. Although, in fact, it’s a story of a terrible crime” (p 1). I never read a story that started off by telling what kind of story it will be, so it grabbed my attention and made me want to continue to read it. After reading the first paragraph, I was preparing myself for a violent story or the memories/fights of the war. However, the story was about a woman, Auxilio Lacouture, who was locked inside a washroom alone “..from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of September”(p 172). Specifically, the fourth floor washroom in the faculty of Philosophy and Literature building at the National Autonomous University (p 22). Due to the invasion of the army, the narrator locked herself inside the washroom for 12 days. With the terrifying situation outside, she tends to deal with her fear by looking back on her memories.
One of the most vivid moments to me was: when she was hiding in a stall, a soldier opened the washroom door and walked in. The detailed description of what had happened and what she was feeling makes me super nervous about what is going to happen. It felt as if I was hiding with her as well.
I like how the narrator described things, events, and people in detail. I noticed the narrator uses a lot of similes and metaphors to describe those. The detailed descriptions helped me imagine and picture the scenes in my head. Another thing I like is that the narrator used brackets/side notes to express her ‘inner feelings’.“…I became a bat, I left the university and wandered around Mexico city like a wraith (I can’t in all honesty say like a fairy, although I would like to) and drank and talked and attended literary gatherings (I knew where to find them all) ” (p20). The inner thoughts make me feel’ closer’ to the narrator as I am able to know more about her ‘inner’ feelings.
After Auxilio saw soldiers, tanks and riot police outside of the window, she went back to the washroom. That brings it to my question for the class: If you were in Auxilio’s situation, what would you do? Would you go back to the washroom and stay there or go somewhere else?
I absolutely adored the concept of this book by Perec and I thoroughly enjoyed every chapter whether it made sense or not. The themes of fantasy and reality are really expressed here and it shows that the author may be contemplating the choice of W over the realism of his memories. The “real” portion of […]
Near the beginning of the novel, the narrator, Georges, explains that he has very little memories from his childhood. He has lived a very difficult early life, losing both his parents during WWII, and moving from different boarding houses to different family members as he grew up in a war-torn world as a young child. […]
Posted in Blogs, Perec | Tagged with childhood, memories, war
Finally! An author I know! I have been SLOWLY reading Perec’s A Void for ages now, I really cant get into it because I keep just rereading sections to make sure there is really no ‘e’ there. I have to admit the difficulty I had reading A Void did not give me much hope for this book. I could talk extensively about my appreciation of A Void in an artistic, boundary pushing, breaking away from norms wowee kinda way but as a book goes, it is kinda rough to read honestly. Anyway! Onto the book I am actually meant to be writing about. W, or the Memory of Childhood was pleasantly read-able for me. It became very quickly obvious that there was two seperate sets of memories that were intertwined into eachother. A note at the beginning of the book brough to my attention that ‘W’ should not be thought of as ‘double-u’ as in French it is called ‘double vé.’ I do not know what the word in French but in Spanish I first thought of vida which I guess I should note means life incase you don’t know. The title fits perfectly for the two intertwining stories being told.
The more fantastical storyline occuring in this novel struck me as a childs coping mechanism at first. I know atleast the part about the island W is based off of a story Perec wrote at 13. When this storyline switched over to focusing on the island I was immediately struck by how cultish it felt. I was intrigued and really found myself looking forward to the next part. The extreme conditions the athletes lived in were representative of what Perec’s mother went through in the concentration camps in real life. This comparison lead me to further realize thar this fantastical story was like a parallel world to real life. A still pretty depressing reimagination of the horrific things that a 13 year old may not have been able to fully comprehend.
I pretty quickly became a lot more interested in the story about the island than the chapters about Perec’s fragmented and warped childhood memories but overall I really enjoyed both. It was depressing honestly, it wasn’t because of what I was reading but the context around it and this sorta childlike but also disturbing tale being told at the same time made me sad. I am done rambling now I think, I have no other thoughts about this that I can word well. To wrap this up I have a very simple question, which part of this story interested you more?
Finally! An author I know! I have been SLOWLY reading Perec’s A Void for ages now, I really cant get into it because I keep just rereading sections to make sure there is really no ‘e’ there. I have to admit the difficulty I had reading A Void did not give me much hope for this book. I could talk extensively about my appreciation of A Void in an artistic, boundary pushing, breaking away from norms wowee kinda way but as a book goes, it is kinda rough to read honestly. Anyway! Onto the book I am actually meant to be writing about. W, or the Memory of Childhood was pleasantly read-able for me. It became very quickly obvious that there was two seperate sets of memories that were intertwined into eachother. A note at the beginning of the book brough to my attention that ‘W’ should not be thought of as ‘double-u’ as in French it is called ‘double vé.’ I do not know what the word in French but in Spanish I first thought of vida which I guess I should note means life incase you don’t know. The title fits perfectly for the two intertwining stories being told.
The more fantastical storyline occuring in this novel struck me as a childs coping mechanism at first. I know atleast the part about the island W is based off of a story Perec wrote at 13. When this storyline switched over to focusing on the island I was immediately struck by how cultish it felt. I was intrigued and really found myself looking forward to the next part. The extreme conditions the athletes lived in were representative of what Perec’s mother went through in the concentration camps in real life. This comparison lead me to further realize thar this fantastical story was like a parallel world to real life. A still pretty depressing reimagination of the horrific things that a 13 year old may not have been able to fully comprehend.
I pretty quickly became a lot more interested in the story about the island than the chapters about Perec’s fragmented and warped childhood memories but overall I really enjoyed both. It was depressing honestly, it wasn’t because of what I was reading but the context around it and this sorta childlike but also disturbing tale being told at the same time made me sad. I am done rambling now I think, I have no other thoughts about this that I can word well. To wrap this up I have a very simple question, which part of this story interested you more?
I unfortunately found this weeks reading to be a bit more difficult to follow than other books we read so far. Not so much in regards to difficult language or translation discrepancies, but rather the multiple storylines that took place throughout the book. In all honesty, I found it quite confusing and found myself having to reread certain passages and pages. From what I gathered, Georges attempts to recall memories from his childhood, while intertwining stories and scenarios from the present.
An initial thought I had after reading the first few chapters, was that it reminded me of our first reading, Swann’s way. In this book, Marcel reflects on his past, specifically childhood and what his relationship was like with his mother and father at the time. I found similarities with this reading, as Georges tries to scrap together memories of his parents before they both perished due to different circumstances during the war. Though most of Georges memories didn’t specifically connect with one another, I found some quite interesting while i felt others were a bit boring. I think part of the reason why I may have found some of these boring is because they seemed to lack emotional depth. In Swann’s Way, for example, Marcel talks about how upset the neglect of his mother made him. With a lot of emotional detail, I truly felt for the character. However, with this reading, I felt as though i was reading descriptions of people or events without receiving much detail on the authors feelings. Which seemed odd to me considering memories are something very personal.
I question if this lack of detail as well as his lack of memory might have something to do with the circumstances under which his parents died. As just a young boy he had to the mourn the loss of both his parents. His father died in the war, and his mother died in the holocaust. Im thinking it’s possible that because of all the chaos and emotional stress he had endured, he lacks memory.
The main thing that has me greatly confused throughout the novel is the multiple storylines and how different they were from one another. Im not too sure how Georges encounter with Otto tied in with his childhood memories, as well as the story of W.
My question for the class: do you think Georges vague memories could be trauma related?
Posted in Blogs, Perec | Tagged with childhood, holocaust, memories, war
