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14.11.2008
I picked up Bolano’s Amulet recently, more or less at random. There isn’t much plot, or, apart from the narrator, much in the way of characterization, so the question becomes what makes it so effective? Part of it is textural—a back-and-forth slurring through time where the narrator might follow someone in 1963, then, once her target is out on the street, declare that it is actually 1973, or that she remembers things that haven’t happened yet. The narrative is so minimal that this kind of slipperiness is pretty easy to deal with, and it creates a very effective replication of the immersiveness of memory, the way the past can wick up and drench the present…
But basically, Bolano, at least in this novel, is a guy to read for his prose. Witness: “And I see myself that night, my friends, walking towards Lilian Serpas’s apartment, driven by a mystery that is, intermittently, like the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city’s calm, an obeisant calm whose sole propety is that of being a mirage.”
The black wind with its geometric holes plays one obvious trick, juxtaposing something fluid and shapeless with the rigidity of hard-edged forms. It also mixes the wind with the city, pocking it with square windows and round potholes, so that these settled forms start to swarm as if alive—lovely.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:33 am
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