The Last Book I Read

Last summer I read a couple of Roberto Bolano's short novels (By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature in the Americas) and really liked them a lot, which, if anything, is an understatement. Recently I finished a third, Amulet, the story of the self-professed "mother of Mexican poetry" who finds herself hiding out in a university lavatory as police shut down the University in Mexico City in 1968 in response to student unrest. While hiding out, she recounts her life past, present, and future, focusing on the relationships she cherishes with the so-called young poets representing several latin American nations. Like the other Bolano books I've read, this one is, among other things, an obvious celebration of the power (or at least the potential power) of poetry and what seems the inevitable failure of mere humans-- the poets themselves confronting political and personal challenges-- to live up to the standards of integrity and truth that their work tends to symbolize. While each of the Bolano books I've read contains elements of abstraction, and literary and historical references that are fuzzy to me, this one was a bit harder than either By Night or Nazi Literature to always make sense of, though it was a thrilling ride nonetheless. Bolano is an amazing stylist, and almost any given paragraph in the book reflects his own poetic way with words, and an uncanny knack for expressing what might be described as the emotional and moral ache behind the creation (or even appreciation) of great art. It's incredible to think that this comes across so strongly in translation, and I can only wonder what it would be like to be able to access these works in their original language of Spanish. It's been a long time since I felt so intellectually stimulated by a novelist, and I'm looking forward to enjoying the rest of Bolano's work in the months to come.