The Amulet was a book that surprised me. Initially, I thought we would be looking at a typical horror story with detailed violence, but this one was a different kind of horror. I believe that I can call this book a horrific one because being stuck in one place and not able to leave is claustrophobic. On top of the movement that was going on, the fact that someone could take her is terrifying. Especially if you are a young student trapped, I couldn’t imagine how scared and confused I would be. She was stuck in the Philosophy and Literature section of the university, which she repeated a lot in the text. This repetition is significant because she was able to read literature and occupy her time in remembering her past and engaging in poetry. In the time she spent locked away, she was lonely, and feeling needs of deprivation and hunger started to arise in her. As human beings, we seek out interaction and personal relationships. A human cannot survive in isolation; it has significant detrimental effects on the brain. One of Auxilio’s coping skills was to immerse herself in her past life and remember all her memories as if they were occurring now to occupy her brain in this time of loneliness. It was her comfort tool. I am still confused by the book’s chronology as she talks about her past as if it was in the past, but over time, the chronology gets blurred as her memories become more fragmented. She talks about things occurring in the future which makes me think. How does she know this? The question I have is, what was the significance of the future? Was she talking about the future or recollecting her past from the point of view of her past self before it occurred?
After watching the lecture, I know that the themes and feelings of the movement are memories of the survivors of this attack. Bolano creates this book as a time capsule for future generations to see and uncover how it felt to be alive in that time. The future dates appearing in the novel create this feeling of a time capsule and that things will be discovered in later years. Exactly what a time capsule is. A quote that made me genuinely think that this book represents a time capsule was:
“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.”
This quote mentions how the movement affected the lives of the Latin American youth and how it was brutal and a sacrifice (which is obvious). But later, people would find out the true story hidden behind the movement. It was about their courage and ability to survive in such a hard place. This story is the time capsule Bolano has created for future generations to read and learn.
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with dreaming, future, literature, memory, Poetry, politics, violence, war
The opening of the novel, wherein the narrator and self-proclaimed “mother of poetry,” Auxilio Lacouture, claims this novel is going to be a horror story but it won’t seem like it from her perspective could not have held more true. As a reader, it was so easy to get distracted by the lifestyles of Auxilio […]
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with future, memory, past, Poetry
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, particularly the style of prose. I love poetry, so this was a riveting read. It is not surprising that an author writing about poets is a poet himself, and thus uses poetic language/devices in his writing. One of my favourite lines is, “women, dust and literature have always gone together” […]
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with historical, poet, Poetry, prose, revolution
This was the first book I read entirely in one sitting. I was surprised, but how could you not keep on reading when the first line is “This is going to be a horror story”(pg.1) … The theme of memory is quite present throughout Auxilio’s broken narrative. Her recollections seem very “…fragmentary, as if mauled … Continue reading “Thoughts on Bolaño’s Amulet”
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with Hallucination, memory, Mexico, Poetry, trauma
I found “The Old Gringo” by Carlos Fuentes to be about what I was expecting; a somewhat turbulent novel that is set around war. It was a bit confusing to read as the perspective seemed to change frequently, but how the chapters were broken into smaller parts helped organize the text a little more. Throughout … Continue reading Week 9: Fuentes’s “The Old Gringo” →
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with death, life, memory, Poetry, relationships, repetition, Romance Studies, war, Weekly Posts
I’m not sure if it was just the version of the novel that I had, but certain parts of the story resembled poetry to me. Not only with how it was written, but how it was visually represented on the pages. With some sentences cutting short and then finishing them in subsequent lines that have […]
Posted in Blogs, Fuentes | Tagged with Civil war, death, death wish, existential, Poetry, relationships, Romance text, unknown, war, Weekly Response
Reading Carlos Fuentes’ “The Old Gringo” felt like being taken into a place somewhere between two cultures, somewhere between past, present, and future, somewhere between sleeping and waking. This feeling, of occupying a space in between seems to me a central theme of the novel, in which it’s primary premises are the exact interrelations between […]
Posted in Blogs, Fuentes | Tagged with America, culture, dream, Mexico, Poetry, time
This was an interesting and enjoyable read for me. At first, I found it a bit difficult to get into, and was frustrated at my lack of knowledge of the geography of Paris which I felt would’ve aided in my understanding of Aragon’s musings of the city in the first twenty pages or so. However, […]
