Aug. 8th, 2009 11:17 am
Bolaño's Amuleto
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muckefuckLast night I finished reading Roberto Bolaño's Amuleto. Two weeks for 144 pages--I actually feel pretty good about that. After all, with few exceptions I read it only during my brief commute to and from work. This was a deliberate choice because--as I told ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu--at home I have my dictionary handy, and the trouble with having a dictionary handy is that the temptation is to look up every unknown word instead of simply plowing ahead, relying on context, and only ultimately looking up those which are necessary to unlock the meaning of a difficult passage or which (like achichincle) stick in your head because they are simply too wicked to ignore.
Essentially, what the author did was take the passage from Los detectivos salvajes narrated by the character of Auxilio Lacouture and expand those ten pages about ten-fold. (I know the math doesn't work out; the print is considerably smaller in my edition of Detectivos.) I found this out from skimming that passage last night and finding that virtually all of the phrasing which appears there reappears in Amuleto. The expansion consists mostly of the introduction of characters and incident, as the original passage concerns only Lacouture's own background and her interactions with the two "savage detectives", Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. In the novella, she recalls meetings with several other notable figures, such as an encountre with the artist Remedios Varos which almost certainly could not have taken place. (There's a dreamlike uncertainty to much of what occurs in the work, even in those passages which aren't explicitly presented as dreams or visions.)
Not having read the longer novel, I'm not certain that Auxilio Lacouture is the character in it whose story I would most want to hear in more detail, but it's a story I enjoyed nonetheless. She's an engaging (unreliable) narrator, with a lot of humour, some of it self-aware and some dramatically ironic. Most of all, I appreciate Bolaño's commitment to the limitations of first-person non-omniscient narration. What Lacouture doesn't know about, we don't see. The closest he comes to violating this is in the confrontation between Belano and the Rey de los Putos. Lacouture sneaks into the room to observe, but there's no gimmick by which she remains invisible, rather she's immediately discovered, though disregarded. Furthermore, the dialogue is presented largely in indirect speech instead of recorded word-for-word as if this were a screenplay rather than a novella.
As an additional bonus, the fact that the entire novella is in the form of a chatty monologue is valuable from a linguistic point of view. Not only does it make the prose less dense than in a more deliberately literary style (although Lacouture is hardly an uncultured voice), but it also leaves me feeling secure in the assumption that most of the turns of phrase I picked up here I could drop into conversation without sounding like a pretentious prick. (That is, moreso than I do normally.) In particular, there were three novel points of syntax I picked up from this work, but I think those would be better handled in an entry of their own.
monshu--at home I have my dictionary handy, and the trouble with having a dictionary handy is that the temptation is to look up every unknown word instead of simply plowing ahead, relying on context, and only ultimately looking up those which are necessary to unlock the meaning of a difficult passage or which (like achichincle) stick in your head because they are simply too wicked to ignore.Essentially, what the author did was take the passage from Los detectivos salvajes narrated by the character of Auxilio Lacouture and expand those ten pages about ten-fold. (I know the math doesn't work out; the print is considerably smaller in my edition of Detectivos.) I found this out from skimming that passage last night and finding that virtually all of the phrasing which appears there reappears in Amuleto. The expansion consists mostly of the introduction of characters and incident, as the original passage concerns only Lacouture's own background and her interactions with the two "savage detectives", Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. In the novella, she recalls meetings with several other notable figures, such as an encountre with the artist Remedios Varos which almost certainly could not have taken place. (There's a dreamlike uncertainty to much of what occurs in the work, even in those passages which aren't explicitly presented as dreams or visions.)
Not having read the longer novel, I'm not certain that Auxilio Lacouture is the character in it whose story I would most want to hear in more detail, but it's a story I enjoyed nonetheless. She's an engaging (unreliable) narrator, with a lot of humour, some of it self-aware and some dramatically ironic. Most of all, I appreciate Bolaño's commitment to the limitations of first-person non-omniscient narration. What Lacouture doesn't know about, we don't see. The closest he comes to violating this is in the confrontation between Belano and the Rey de los Putos. Lacouture sneaks into the room to observe, but there's no gimmick by which she remains invisible, rather she's immediately discovered, though disregarded. Furthermore, the dialogue is presented largely in indirect speech instead of recorded word-for-word as if this were a screenplay rather than a novella.
As an additional bonus, the fact that the entire novella is in the form of a chatty monologue is valuable from a linguistic point of view. Not only does it make the prose less dense than in a more deliberately literary style (although Lacouture is hardly an uncultured voice), but it also leaves me feeling secure in the assumption that most of the turns of phrase I picked up here I could drop into conversation without sounding like a pretentious prick. (That is, moreso than I do normally.) In particular, there were three novel points of syntax I picked up from this work, but I think those would be better handled in an entry of their own.