Repositories of Memory

Repositories of Memory Jon Curley Amulet Roberto Bolaño Translated by Chris Andrews New Directions http://www.ndpublishing.com 184 pages; cloth, $21.95 For most North American readers at least, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño will be a posthumous discovery. Bom in Chile in 1 953, long a resident of Mexico City and Barcelona, Bolaño died on July 15, 2003 of liver failure. The specific date should be noted as it signals a great loss to the wild, wide world of letters. He was a poet and novelist of phenomenal distinction and output and will be missed by all who cherish artists indebted to various literary traditions (in his case, Latin American, North American, and European models—both experimental and realist schools) and yet forge a voice of original ethical, historical, and stylistic vision. Only since his death has he been bom into American literary culture or, more properly, adopted by it. His esteemed presence is most welcome. Expertly translated by Chris Andrews, New Directions has published four Bolaño titles so far: the novels By Night in Chile (2000), Distant Star ( 1996), and Amulet (1999), and a short story collection, Last Evenings on Earth (2006). The majority of these tales deal with the scourge of Latin American politics and history, grasping at the magnitude of impact of state terror on both victims and perpetrators, writers and language, history as it is deceived, revised, or disclosed by its commentators. They function not so much as political allegories as they do sharp fictional recreations of historical circumstances, demonstrating the exorbitant pressures placed on subjectivity by politics. This personalized approach to representing historical nightmare elucidates and intensifies the experiential processing of pain and suffering in witnesses and narrators through whom flow justifications , pleas for understanding, and futile assertions of identity against the onslaught of political violence. These stories become probings ofconsciousness that simulate the derangement of order—psychic, political , cultural —in various contemporary societies. This textual evocation of trauma produces harrowing testimonials to the crisis of moral conscience in the face of terrible political conditions. Such representations are politicized, and, to this extent, Bolaño's works are politically engaged; but how he captures the nuances and complicated fractures of social identity as it succumbs to its environment makes his technique far more trenchant than more programmatic instances of "committed literature." The three Bolaño novels already in English are scarcely longer than novellas (Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish his much longer The Savage Detectives [ 1998J in April 2007 and 2666 12004], his recognized opus, within the next few years). Each also foregrounds first-person narrators who, in an effort to explain the circumstances affecting their choices and actions, engage in meandering accounts that read like confessions. Father Urrutia in By Night in Chile practically unravels as he recalls his evolution from reactionary literary and cultural critic to Opus Dei member to Pinochet regime lackey. Likewise, the unnamed narrator ofDistant Starexhaustively struggles to understand how a member of his literary coterie became a torturer and murderer in early- 1970s Chile, dedicating himself literally to using atrocity as an art form. In Amulet, the protagonist, Auxilio Lacouture , a Uruguayan bom poet-manqué and maternal confidante to a coterie of young Mexico City poets, deliberates in an increasingly vertiginous, repetitive soliloquy about the unsettling effects of a military suppression ofa leftist university in September 1968. She obsesses over dates, the value of poetry, the contribution of past writers to cultural achievement, and the terrifying dawn of a cruel new society in which freedom can only thrive in the imagination. Bolaño deals with the scourge of Latin American politics and history. The amulet of the title is a song she hears in a dream reverie: "And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice , I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure." Desire and pleasure, sexual and literary, are Auxilio's prime motivating forces; the eradication of their possible survival in a dictatorship spur her to both document the horrifying events that occur around her (she...