Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives was the first book I read by Roberto Bolaño. That was more than 15 years ago. I loved it, but I remember it only vaguely. Almost more as a mood than a text. I went on to read 2666 and then several of the earlier, shorter works – most recently The Spirit of Science Fiction. I had a similar feeling reading Amulet to what I felt reading The Spirit of Science Fiction. While Amulet is more polished, I had the feeling that it was practice for what would become The Savage Detectives. There were those same familiar names and places and events, which have somehow stayed with me over the years. Amulet even had the tiniest hint of 2666. It's just a passing moment, but the book refers to someplace looking like a graveyard, but not a graveyard of the present – a graveyard in the year 2666 (whatever that means).

The central event of Amulet is the occupation of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1968. The book's narrator is an undocumented Uruguayan woman who does occasional casual labor for faculty in the department of literature and philosophy. She hides out in a bathroom on campus and remains undetected through the army occupation. She is part of the older generation, but the book – and its narrator – are interested in the youth movements. There's a second character in Amulet who is without doubt a stand-in for Bolaño himself: Chilean, born in the same year (1953), and called in the book Arturo Belano. Like Bolaño is supposed to (but may not) have done, Belano made a trip to Chile in 1973* to participate in the revolution and returned to Mexico City a changed person. Perhaps Bolaño made this fictional version of himself as he wished he had been. 

 * I'll add that Bolaño is in good company if he missed out on being in Chile for the revolution and felt some shame about it. This is a theme in José Donoso's Curfew, whose central character left Chile well before 1973 (as did Donoso himself) but played the part of an exiled person though he never had any official dealings with the Pinochet regime. Of course Donoso is from a different generation: he was over 50 in 1973, when Bolaño was just 20.