Amulet
Roberto Bolaño
(Author)
Chris Andrews
(Translator)
Description
Amulet is a monologue, like Bolano's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. 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 cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books).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. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. 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.
Product Details
Price
$16.95
$15.76
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
May 01, 2008
Pages
184
Dimensions
5.31 X 0.59 X 8.03 inches | 0.5 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811217460
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About the Author
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.
Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He also taught at the University of Western Sydney, where he was a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. As well as translating nine books by Roberto Bolano and ten books (and counting) by César Aira, he also brought the French author Kaouther Adimi's Our Riches into English for New Directions. Andrews has won the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations. Additionally, he has published the critical studies Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge and Roberto Bolano's Fiction: An Expanding Universe as well as two collections of poems, Cut Lunch and Lime Green Chair, for which he won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.
Reviews
The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.--Susan Sontag
He is by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time.--Ilan Stavans
Bolaño's reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent.--Larry Rohter
Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own.--Francisco Goldman
He is by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time.--Ilan Stavans
Bolaño's reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent.--Larry Rohter
Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own.--Francisco Goldman
