The theme of memory has been consistent throughout all of our course readings. While reading Amulet, I started to find some similarities to the other readings. Specifically, W, or the Memory of Childhood because with regard to memory, the two are centred around a traumatic event and cause the narrators to struggle to remember an entire situation with certainty. Also, the shrouded women and the Old Gringo because they each have a woman as the narrator looking back on their life events.
For Amulet, the story is taken from Auxilio Lacouture, an Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico and became the “mother of poetry.” I found the timeline of this novel a little confusing at first, but after reading more and watching the lecture video, I realized that Auxilio was recalling memories from the past and also the future while she was trapped in the fourth-floor bathroom of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for almost two weeks. I found Auxilio very likable and easy to sympathize with. While trapped in the bathroom during the violent army occupation, she begins to immerse herself within these memories or dreams to cope with her situation. Her memories are based on her life in Mexico City and her interactions with the poets she befriends.
I thought it was interesting how Amulet, like the Old Gringo, provided a new perspective on historical events. Until I watched this week’s lecture I was unaware of the Tlatelolco Massacre and the Mexican student movement of 1968. Both Bolano and Fuentes gave us new perspectives on these historical events. However, where Amulet and the Old Gringo differ Amulet starts to compare to the Time of the Doves because while we are made aware of the political situation going on, it centers around one woman’s experience. In both Amulet and the Time of the Doves, we see the impacts these movements have on a person, but the story does not revolve around the violence or the actual fight. Instead, we see Auxilio and Natalia’s life and what these events mean for their lives and how it changes them. I am interested in seeing how the next two readings will relate and compare to what we have already read.
My question for the class is: Since we are on week ten of our readings, how do you compare this text to the others? What similarities have you been noticing throughout the term?
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with history, memory, violence, war
The theme of memory has been consistent throughout all of our course readings. While reading Amulet, I started to find some similarities to the other readings. Specifically, W, or the Memory of Childhood because with regard to memory, the two are centred around a traumatic event and cause the narrators to struggle to remember an entire situation with certainty. Also, the shrouded women and the Old Gringo because they each have a woman as the narrator looking back on their life events.
For Amulet, the story is taken from Auxilio Lacouture, an Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico and became the “mother of poetry.” I found the timeline of this novel a little confusing at first, but after reading more and watching the lecture video, I realized that Auxilio was recalling memories from the past and also the future while she was trapped in the fourth-floor bathroom of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for almost two weeks. I found Auxilio very likable and easy to sympathize with. While trapped in the bathroom during the violent army occupation, she begins to immerse herself within these memories or dreams to cope with her situation. Her memories are based on her life in Mexico City and her interactions with the poets she befriends.
I thought it was interesting how Amulet, like the Old Gringo, provided a new perspective on historical events. Until I watched this week’s lecture I was unaware of the Tlatelolco Massacre and the Mexican student movement of 1968. Both Bolano and Fuentes gave us new perspectives on these historical events. However, where Amulet and the Old Gringo differ Amulet starts to compare to the Time of the Doves because while we are made aware of the political situation going on, it centers around one woman’s experience. In both Amulet and the Time of the Doves, we see the impacts these movements have on a person, but the story does not revolve around the violence or the actual fight. Instead, we see Auxilio and Natalia’s life and what these events mean for their lives and how it changes them. I am interested in seeing how the next two readings will relate and compare to what we have already read.
My question for the class is: Since we are on week ten of our readings, how do you compare this text to the others? What similarities have you been noticing throughout the term?
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with history, memory, violence, war
I found this week’s reading Amulet by Roberto Bolaño a captivating read. I personally don’t read a lot of books about war or know much history about this context in the book, but Bolaño made it enjoyable with the narrator Auxilio. I was quickly grasped by the book because of her captivating narration. Throughout this class, I was surprised by how much these books made me more aware of the history and the brutality of war and revolutions. The writing in this book and its details made it easy for me to visualize her thoughts and these different scenarios in my head.
The narrator Auxilio hides in the lavatories of her university, fearing that soldiers will come and discover her there. She begins to recall memories of her friends, literature, and life. She is seen as unsure about her purpose and roots, trying to re-imagine herself as she says, “one day I arrived in Mexico without really knowing why or how or when.” These memories and reflections of her friends seem like she is a sideline character in her own life. Auxilio does not fit into any of the Mexican cultural roles, so she finds herself taking on a nurturing role to the young poets. She seems to find her purpose in life and lives through her friends and their experiences and this is what she holds onto while stuck in the lavatories, along with the visions of the future. I found it surprising that Auxilio remained calm despite her fear in the lavatories. As a reader, I was distracted and somewhat stressed out by this scenario as I was worried about what was going to happen to her.
As we have talked about in our class lectures a concept that is a reoccurring theme in every book we have read is memories. These memories that we follow from these characters show a pattern that we can start to connect and compare each of them with each other. The shrouded woman was one that stuck out to me as they both revolve around a woman who is reaching and guessing about what possibilities could have come from their lives. Also comparing Amulet to W, both main characters are experiencing displacement due to the impacts of their respective traumatic events.
My question for the class is: How do you think her memory and the event of the occupation impact her visions about the future.
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with history, memories, war
Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet was much more violent than I expected the story to be. It focuses on the War in Mexico as told through the perspective of Auxilio Lacouture. Lacouture is a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960’s. I think this has been my favourite book so far as I have found a better way to read the later books compared to some of the initial ones read. Bolaño writes such a tragic and horrifying story with so much tranquility and peacefulness. For such a sad story, it is described very beautifully.
This novel taught me about the war and massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968. I had never even heard of the Tlatelolco massacre until this reading. Similar to Manea’s novel, the story draws from real life instances to educate the readers about history. I think it is important to read novel’s of this kind. We consume so much news and media content that we have become desensitized to violence in the world.
Lacouture is forced to take shelter in a woman’s bathroom during the War in Mexico in the 1960’s. She hides from the military in the bathroom for many days on the University campus. While her peers are arrested and killed, she hides from the police for fourteen-days. She is then the only person who holdouts being on campus during that time. She spends her time thinking about both her past and her future as the story jumps between the two. I find the way that the story was written to be very interesting. It seemed as though there were tangents that held little information, followed by paragraphs full of information.
Similarly to other stories, I think that the aim of this novel is to appreciate the story in it’s entirety, rather than rip it apart looking for specifics. This course has taught me to read older literature with a different approach. Rather than hyper-fixate on details, it is important to read between the lines and learn from the entirety of the story. I appreciate getting to learn this new way of reading older literature as it makes it much more interesting.
The ending of the story was the most impactful in my opinion. The “ghost-children” singing and walking together, it has a more ominous and apocalyptic tone than the rest of the story. My question to my classmates is: Was this also the most impactful part of the story for you? If not, what was?
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with oppression, tragedy, war
Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet was much more violent than I expected the story to be. It focuses on the War in Mexico as told through the perspective of Auxilio Lacouture. Lacouture is a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960’s. I think this has been my favourite book so far as I have found a better way to read the later books compared to some of the initial ones read. Bolaño writes such a tragic and horrifying story with so much tranquility and peacefulness. For such a sad story, it is described very beautifully.
This novel taught me about the war and massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968. I had never even heard of the Tlatelolco massacre until this reading. Similar to Manea’s novel, the story draws from real life instances to educate the readers about history. I think it is important to read novel’s of this kind. We consume so much news and media content that we have become desensitized to violence in the world.
Lacouture is forced to take shelter in a woman’s bathroom during the War in Mexico in the 1960’s. She hides from the military in the bathroom for many days on the University campus. While her peers are arrested and killed, she hides from the police for fourteen-days. She is then the only person who holdouts being on campus during that time. She spends her time thinking about both her past and her future as the story jumps between the two. I find the way that the story was written to be very interesting. It seemed as though there were tangents that held little information, followed by paragraphs full of information.
Similarly to other stories, I think that the aim of this novel is to appreciate the story in it’s entirety, rather than rip it apart looking for specifics. This course has taught me to read older literature with a different approach. Rather than hyper-fixate on details, it is important to read between the lines and learn from the entirety of the story. I appreciate getting to learn this new way of reading older literature as it makes it much more interesting.
The ending of the story was the most impactful in my opinion. The “ghost-children” singing and walking together, it has a more ominous and apocalyptic tone than the rest of the story. My question to my classmates is: Was this also the most impactful part of the story for you? If not, what was?
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with oppression, tragedy, war
Bolaño’s “Amulet” caught my interest with its gripping first line – “This is going to be a horror story”. The narrator, Auxillo is an unlikely choice and voice of a book. She is far from ordinary; impulsive, thoughtful and ambivalent. … Continue reading →
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with abyss, future, history, language, memory, nostalgia, war
Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet is the journey of a narrator who is originally from Uruguay but later shifted to Mexico with influences from other Latin American countries as well. The narrator and the author reflect on Latin America while living in another Spanish country. To start, I enjoyed reading this novel as, based on the migration […]
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with latin america, memory, motherhood, war
Amulet, to me, was a simple read. It did not feel as though the story was as hard to follow as some others we have read this term. Just like many other novellas we’ve read, the story focused a lot on the past and reflection of important moments of the narrators life, primary being locked […]
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 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
