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
“All she, and Bolaño, can do is ensure that the echoes of their song, the traces of that generosity and courage, endure as both promise and warning.” This statement from Professor Beasley-Murray, for me, was a very precise one-sentence summary of the meaning behind Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet. Indeed, this story seems to be the living […]
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with history, literature, Magic Realism, modernism, recollection, Symbolism, temporality, war
The Old Gringo was definitely one of my favorite reads so far in this course. The book title really caught me off guard and I was surprised with how the storyline went. Knowing that the term “gringo” is used by the Latino community to describe a caucasian white male. If I may add, a caucasian […]
Posted in Blogs, Fuentes | Tagged with adventure, carlosfuentes, war
Initially when reading this novel I found the words and names to all mix together. The start of the book felt like a bag of random facts and information which made it hard for me to follow along and get invested to. But who knows maybe I was just reading “The Old Gringo” on an […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with love, revolution, war
