Roberto Bolaño

 I read Amulet this week, and here are some of my notes from the book.

I loved Auxilio Lacouture, the narrator of this book, and when I first opened it, I was drawn in by Auxilio Lacouture’s offbeat and humorous way of speaking. She describes herself and others, often with some lovely commentary on the side. I felt like I was talking to a close friend, and she would occasionally tell you stories about her daily life and spit them out while you listened and felt relaxed and happy. Her imagination is also rich. When she works with two poets, she constantly tries to understand their psychology and character and convey her impressions of them to the reader. This appropriate side-by-side portrayal does not make the two poets feel too abrupt but naturally brings out the nature of Auxilio Lacouture. Even simply cleaning dust, she associates with a poet’s unique romantic thinking the way of life of these dust, the destiny of these dust. The image of a lively and romantic female poet emerges from the page.

Auxilio Lacouture is trapped in the women’s room after a raid on the university campus, and she suddenly begins to remember her past. She seems to have nothing, but she also has a lot. Her memories and the people she meets are the treasures she has had over the years, her firm amulet. In her mouth, we meet many people who were quite famous in the poetry world of their time. Unlike most autobiographical novels we have read before, where the story’s perspective revolves around the protagonist, the narrator of this novel is more like the protagonist of the entire book. The narrator, Auxilio Lacouture, makes vague references to Arturo Belano in most of her recollections, and Lacouture remembers Arturo Belano like a passerby in each story, occupying only a tiny part of her memory. But as this fragmentary impression grows, the image of Arturo Belano gradually becomes more apparent. We can thus see Arturo Belano’s change and growth in different stages, as most autobiographical novels do. When Arturo Belano is still mixing with the young poets, he is lovely and sober, with a unique perspective on the judgment of poets and an affectionate concern for Auxilio Lechturay. When he returned to Mexico after the war, he became silent and thoughtful, preferring to interact with older people and thus becoming more mature.

Auxilio Lacouture often refers to the women’s restroom in the philosophy and literature department throughout the book. Auxilio Lacouture stays in the women’s room for thirteen days and thirteen years. It is not until the end of the novel that I can identify the previous story about Auxilio Lacouture’s experience after she escaped from the university or the literary imagination she relied on to survive and hold on to while still in the women’s room.

At the beginning of the novel, Auxilio Lacouture says that “this is going to be a horror story.” So my question for this book is:  What is the horror part shown in this novel?