Roberto Bolaño is this year’s trendy author. (Proof: this snarky bit, an appearance on the The New Yorker's blog, plus many reverential book reviews in all the right places.) He’d probably be pleased about that, if were he still alive. Bolaño spent his youth in debauch, and once he’d settled down, moved to Spain and started a family, his liver was so battered that he could not even drink coffee; he died while awaiting a transplant in 2003. Though he was Chilean (like my hero, Pablo Neruda) and a Latin American left wing revolutionary (like another of my favorite poets, Roque Dalton) I am really embarrassed to admit I’d never heard of him until this year, when his hefty 2666 was released in English translation. For pocketbook reasons, the first Bolaño book I tackled was not the voluminous 2666—which is nearly a thousand pages long and $30 expensive—but Amulet, a modestly sized paperback. (I suspect many other people are following this pattern … When I was in Left Bank Books a few weeks ago to buy some Christmas cards, and I wandered over to see what Bolaño they had in stock, it was multiple copies of Amulet.)
Now I’ll say this: I don’t care if I look like a trendy reader, or cheap for that matter, for choosing to read Amulet. I finished it as I was flying home to Salt Lake City and was glad I had the window seat so that I could turn my head and pretend to be extremely interested in the clouds as I wiped all the tears and snot off my face, it made me cry so openly. And when I was home in Utah, I handed the book off to my dear friend Mary ... when I love a book, I don't act rationally. I give it to someone else to read and implore them to read it, rather than holding onto it, a tendency I often regret.
Here’s a capsule description from The Quarterly Conversation's review:
“It’s a slim book, though that should not confuse it with ‘slight’ or ‘minor.’ It’s a major accomplishment, narrated by and the story of one of his greatest characters: a woman named Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan living illegally in Mexico. She finds herself in the bathroom during the Mexican army’s occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the days preceding the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, the incident in which Mexican president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz brutally suppressed a growing student rebellion by ordering police to fire wildly into a large protest in Mexico City’s Plaza of Three Cultures. As the only person still on campus, she holes up in her stall with a book of poems. As the violence in Mexico City escalates outside of the safety of her women’s room stall, poetry becomes her nourishment and lifeforce.”
I’ll offer another embarrassing confession: I had a hard time falling into this book for the first few chapters, because it’s so bleak. Beautiful, but bleak (Bolaño considered himself a poet first and wrote fiction only to support his family … but the poet shines through in the prose.) For all the Neruda and Dalton and Fuentes I’ve devoured over the years, my internal landscape still mirrors the United States. And no matter how vigorously I try to train myself out of that American habit of thinking in surfaces (optimism as persona, the sleek lobby, the neat lawn), it still persists. Auxilio is not beautiful. Bolaño describes her—or, rather, she describes herself!—as prone to keeping her hand over her mouth when she speaks, because she doesn’t have all of her teeth. She’s tall and thin and has wispy blond hair and keeps a knife in her skirt pocket. She works as a secretary at the university, and lives in modest little apartments, which she gets swept out of every so often, and loses everything, including her precious books. Though she has Anna Wintour’s haircut, there’s nothing glamorous about Auxilio, even though she's fascinating and funny. She is a straight talker from the very first sentence: “This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won't seem like that. Although, in fact, it’s the story of a terrible crime.”
The book is digressive and hallucinatory and has plots and subplots folding in and over each other, but there is a larger, overarching plot, so it's not just for literature-heads, but people who love stories; the last 10 pages have affected me as much as anything I’ve ever read in the past 10 years. Like a lot of Latin American writers, accustomed as he was to political tumult and the term “disappeared,” Bolaño was incapable of writing stories marked by that cheap sentimentality that all cultures are capable of, but is very often spotted within the borders of the U.S. Maybe what made me so sad on that airplane was the fact that reading Amulet revealed to me that I’m still as poisoned as anyone in America by a craving for gloss and easy sentimentality. And that if you really follow those to impulses to their root, they are a refutation of life itself, something that a man who was dying of liver disease, who’d lived through Pinochet’s coup, understandably rejected. In America, it’s easy to kill off your novel’s heroine when she’s ugly and eccentric and can’t afford dental implants. If she can’t be sexy, with a potential for star casting, at least we can make her a martyr! It takes a lot of guts, and a lot of poetry, to write reverentially about her washing her delicates in an institutional sink and writing poems on squares of toilet paper, and to say: well, there's nothing wrong with ugliness, but me, I absolutely refuse to worship at the altar of muerte. —Stefene Russell
