bolano’s characters are some of the most beautiful. they miraculously avoid sentimentality while achieving a too-beautiful-to-speak-of romanticism — though reducing them so is an error, that quality he gets really does tear me up…

his characters remind me of the vow of poverty monastics make. it isn’t a negative vow–at least not for the nun. it is in fact a positive one, one that moves the renunciate closer to the divine. bolano’s poets and losers and mothers are an equal type. and one way to describe his natural, moving, ecstatic and elegiac style is to say that it simultaneously shows the mundane and profoundly human while it recognizes and manifests the divine (or maybe better said: the cosmic).

AMULET is a slowly shifting machine, moving from a narrative built first on a natural and sad and graceful character development into a kind of modernized persephone-in-hell myth then into a creepy symbolic tale (though for what is hard to say) and finally into a long description of an icy, abstract landscape.

i probably didn’t do a good job assigning the sections descriptions–and i missed a few–but there are distinct parts to this novel. and bolano gently leads the reader (and virgil and dante are explicitly mentioned) through these passages, a series of subtle changes. the book is one long song describing the horror story (that the narrator proclaims will not appear to be a horror story, but is, nonetheless) of living through history–in this case latin america’s revolutionary 60s and 70s.

here’s one paragraph, within which bolano seems to convey succinctly and impossibly some of the tumult of that era. a phone call is made asking about arturo (a boy who has gone from mexico to chile in 1973 to ‘take part in the revolution’) (and where he barely escapes execution):

“One night, at a party in Colonia Anzures, propped on my elbows in a sea of tequila, watching a group of friends trying to break open a pinata in the garden, it occurred to me that it was an ideal time to call Arturo’s place. His sister answered the phone. Merry Christmas, I said. Merry Christmas, she replied sleepily. Then she asked where I was. With some friends. What’s with Arturo? He’s coming back to Mexico next month. When exactly? We don’t know. I’d like to go to the airport, I said. Then for a while we said nothing and listened to the party noises coming from the patio. Are you feeling OK, his sister asked. I’m feeling strange. Well that’s normal for you. Not all that normal; most of the time I feel perfectly well. Arturo’s sister was quiet for a bit, then she said that actually she was feeling pretty strange herself. Why’s that? I asked. It was a purely rhetorical question. To tell the truth, both of us had plenty reasons to be feeling strange. I can’t remember what she said in reply. We wished each other a merry Christmas again and hung up.” p.76.

find used or find in a library

i just finished the first section… what a book! this is the hottest book i’ve read in a long time. very very sexy. whatever your orientation, i think this book would steam you up… to be a young thing around town! …and the writing is so natural… he makes it seem so easy. so far it reminds in a way of frederick ted castle’s ANTICIPATION, not too similar except that fast fast momentum of being young and everything happening at once, the gush to speak. the immediately-recognizable genius *and* likeability of someone like brautigan, though with a much longer, more sustained development. sprawling like a wong-kar-wai film (and i think i think that not just cuz 2666 sounds like 2046) but the coolness and the beautiful men and women, the youth-cult and moral wideness to speak credibly and generously while also truthfully about pimps and crime and prostitution and drugs, the ability to flow the whole mix all together. the underlying (glamourous) sadness. but really he stands alone and apart from all these, unique.

the idea of poetry in it, like how bunuel would speak about the surrealists as being governed by an invincible and strict moral code. an unstateable moral code but one governed by the laws of poetry!

let’s see how section two goes…
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…now reporting from the middle of the middle. i thought that the middle would sprawl too much, but it doesn’t. a long but comfortable narrative, once you’re in it. slowly the story of ulises and arturo becomes revealed. an amazing (and actually: sweet) bit of autobiographical fiction.

constantly reflective about literature, how to live a life of one, its mechanics, the people, the gossip, the magazines, the rejections, the attitude.

to wet yer whistle, to remind you of how yours was once wet… here’s a bit i liked, from p. 184, from the POV of an older professor-type:

“There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. …the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search for Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain ( a paradigm of calm, serene complete literature, in my humble opinion)… Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall.”

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finished it. man–what a book! bradford morrow says, truly, about coleman dowell’s ISLAND PEOPLE, “The kind of novel that can change a reader’s life,”–and this one too! fantastic! it changed my life!

consume.