Protestors took to the streets shouting ‘ We Don't Want Olympic Games, We Want a Revolution!’ Roberto Bolaño’s slim, yet satisfying, Amulet has as its centerpiece the Mexican army occupation of UNAM, using the violent event as a nucleus around which narrator Auxilio Lacouture’s life events orbit. The Olympic Committee, headed by an American, chose Mexico as the first third-world country to host an Olympic event, and protestors saw this as an attempt to portray Mexico as a country stabilized by American support and financial backing. ¹ Student demonstrations were organized in response to the killings of several students by the police called in to repress a fight between gang members of two rival schools-the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM) and National Politechnical Institute (IPN)-and were further aggravated by the upcoming summer Olympics taking place in Mexico City. The student youth of Mexico raised their fists in protest during the summer and fall of 1968, marching against the government towards the violent climax of the Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2nd. In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes. In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland."Īlthough deep down he always felt like a poet, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections.
In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño passed away.
He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment. Regarding his native country Chile, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. He continued with his poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector - working during the day and writing at night. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the 70s, and the last words of the novel are "And that song is our amulet."įor most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. She's tall, thin,brand blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books). The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafes and bars of the University.
Amulet is a monologue, like Bolano's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile.