Amulet, Roberto Bolano
Amulet, Roberto Bolano
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Amulet

Author: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews

Narrator: Adriana Sananes

Unabridged: 4 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/09/2025


Synopsis

“Roberto Bolaño’s oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century.” —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds

“[Latin America’s] most vibrant expositor: an acid-tongued, truth-telling, peripatetic genius, who lived all too briefly, wrote in a fever and did not go gentle into that good night.” —Marie Arana, The Washington Post

Auxilio Lacouture is the mother of Mexican poetry. Uruguayan by birth, Mexican by destiny, the vagrant poetess serves as guardian, confidant, literary mentor, and occasional lover to a generation of Mexico City’s mad young poets, a fixture in their heady bohemian swirl. On the infamous day in 1968 when the army invades and occupies the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico to quash student protests, Auxilio is alone in the women’s bathroom of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, reading the poetry of Pedro Garfías on the toilet. Trapped yet defiant, she remains there for twelve days, her life’s story, past and future, pouring from her in a great deluge—and with it, a story of a lost generation, of literature, and of Latin America. Hallucinatory and prophetic, Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet is a spellbinding meditation on youth and valor, on violence and exile, on memory and history: a song of hope, and of love.

About Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

About Chris Andrews

Chris Andrews has translated books of prose fiction by César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, Liliana Colanzi, and Ágota Kristóf, among others. He is also the author of How to Do Things with Forms and The Oblong Plot.


Reviews

History is like a horror story. 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. ¹ Student demonstrations were organized in response to the killings of se......more

Goodreads review by Ben on October 15, 2023

Amulet focuses on one of the minor characters in The Savage Detectives, Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, 'the mother of all young Mexican poets'. When the army invades the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1968, Auxilio happens to be in the women's toilets, and fearing she m......more

Goodreads review by Chris_P on August 23, 2020

Roberto Bolano – Amulet Just a moment while I’m trying to dry myself after this dive into a sea of words. A sea in which you’re in and which is in you at the same time. A sea sometimes calm (but never too calm) and other times swirling with fluctuating intensity, roaring and crashing, never allowing......more

Goodreads review by Ian on December 03, 2017

When Only a Wedge Will Do I read this because I’m a lazy cheapskate. I bought it for $5 (reduced from $50) in a recent Borders sale. But I was looking for a relatively short wedgie between larger undertakings, the next of which will be Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84”. At 184 pages, it’s more of a novella than......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on January 16, 2019

"This story breaks away from its box." Roberto Bolaño destroys the reader’s preexisting expectations, as what the reader sees is rarely what he gets. I’ve only previously read "Los Detectives Salvajes" before, and was immediately happy to see that this was an extension of that novel, or, more accura......more


Quotes

One of Bolaño’s most moving books . . . A tour de force . . . A symbol of a time in which passionate conviction and generosity seemed still possible, in both literature and life.”
—Aura Estrada, Boston Review

“A curiously joyful novel that delights in its storytelling even as it struggles with the question of how art might be sustained under conditions resolutely opposed to it.”
—Siddhartha Deb, Harper’s Magazine

“An enthralling and haunting ode to youth, life on the margins, poetry and poets, and Mexico City.”
—Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy

“Intoxicating . . . As romantic in its aesthetic rapture as in its flavour of encircling doom . . . Amulet pays homage to the wild dreams that helped to keep hope alive.”
—Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

“[Amulet] reimagines what literature can become.”
—Heather McRobie, New Statesman