Amulet — Roberto Bolano

“An enthralling and haunting ode to youth, life on the margins, poetry and poets, and Mexico City.” -- Francisco Goldman

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 military invades the campus of the city's main university, Auxilio is in the women's bathroom of the department of literature and philosophy, reading the poetry of Pedro Garfias on the toilet. Trapped and alone, she hides there for twelve days, her life's story, past and future, pouring from her in a great deluge. Hallucinatory and prophetic, Roberto Bolaño's Amulet is a haunting, spellbinding meditation on violence and exile, on memory and history -- a requiem for a lost generation.