Roberto Bolano's Amulet: Book Review

Roberto Bolano’s Amulet: Book Review

By Armando Ortiz

Migration of birds come and go every season. In the summer months, they fly north to the plains and plateaus of North America. As winter approaches, they return south to the Caribbean and southern parts of Mexico. At one time these movements of birds might have created visuals in the sky of ever moving dancers, and clouds could have been metamorphosing into splatters. Imagine farmers and hunters, just four generations ago, shooting shotguns into the air. In one afternoon seeing hundreds of birds just fall to the ground. Mix with those years of polluting fumes and oil spills. Now, all we see are glimpses of things that were, the sounds that we hear are just an acoustic tune to the symphonic sounds that the wildlife of America once breathed. We wake up, and might not pay much care to the sounds that emanate from outside of the window. Its background noise that disturbs our waking life, like a squeaky wheel that demands attention, whether you like it or not, it’s there, like the small birds that make tiny dust bowls on the ground of local parks, that is what remains, a forgotten memory mixed with the present.

In Roberto Bolano’s Amulet he brings that experience into focus through Auxilio Lacouture, the main character and narrator of the novel, who also represents the past and present of the Americas. She is an imaginary figure that survives the military takeover of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1968. A few months before the Olympics were hosted in Mexico City there were major protests. Many of these movements were against the corruption that people saw within the government, and its suppression of organizations trying to improve social conditions for everyone in the country. She finds herself in the women’s bathroom, on the 4th floor of the philosophy building, and these she hides. She claims to be the mother of Mexican poetry, while others in the book contend that she is the mother of all American poetry. Hiding in the restroom for several days marks her and those memories become intertwined with her legendary status throughout the novel.

We can feel her breath, the passing of time, the withering of her body, but also the hopes that emanate from her spirit. We learn more about her by what she reads as a way for Bolano to introduce us to more authors, different artists and music that we might not be familiar with. Spanish poets that appear at the start of the story, have different political views, but similar talents. Artists like Remedios Varo, a surrealist painter, and music from Spain.

Auxilio lives a harsh life, spending time at bars and cafes with fellow writers and artists. She is a free spirit, born in Uruguay, living illegally in Mexico City and always doing odd jobs for professors and writers alike. Living a poet’s life, one that Roberto Bolano probably lived. In Mexico City Bolano spent time with artists and poets, and was a member of the poetic movement, Infrarealism. Though she has not had “success” she is a definite presence amongst the literary crowds of the city. It is through her encounters with other writers and artists that we also learn and gain insight into the richness of the Spanish language and its legacy in the Americas.

Spending most of the time roaming the streets with fellow artists she is known by the underground and is a close friend to recently returned Chilean poet Arturo Belano, the author’s alter ego. She finds affinity for the young writer because he too has experienced hardships. He has traveled and walked through the different valleys of Spanish speaking Americas and he too has aspirations. Bolano shows us how even without her papers being in order, Auxilio is able to navigate and intermingle with Mexico City’s creative currents that interact with the seedier sections of Mexican society. She sees the different facets of an artist’s life and the hacks that exist amongst the crowds; she lives a few months in a room and moves on. Her life is a continual ebb and flow of experiences, as if she is reflecting on all that she has experienced. Within that life you see that poetry and the culture give her sustenance. In many ways it is a metaphor to Bolano’s life as a writer and testament to his travels throughout the Spanish speaking world. As she reflects on her life experiences and the moments spent in the restroom of the 4th floor it all becomes clear that the only reason to live is to hope for another day. Another day of life is a day of ecstasy where she lives through the night again and welcomes the rising of the sun and sees the inhabitants of the city wake up to a hustle and bustle.

Towards the later part of the novel Auxilio has a vision or dream where she is walking a tall mountain and she sees a sea of humanity converging into one. Within that human caravan emerges a migrating sparrow and the elusive quetzal. One new this land, while the other indigenous to the Americas. There are defeats and victories, and within that a new hope, a new tomorrow, and a new rise. It represents the forging of a new culture and the dream of having the art of writing nurtured by those who roam the night and write down their thoughts. Auxilio has made Mexico her home, and although she is illegal, that is where she flourishes. In a similar vein, people from Latin America migrate to the US, and their presence enriches and alters its culture and language. Another way of looking at Roberto’s vision is by examining a map of the world and seeing that the Spanish language continues to exist and the influences that each valley, nation, and region have over other Spanish speaking communities is still significant, and relevant, which creates a literary culture that is varied, flourishing and vibrant.

Autumn Leaves in Beijing

Autumn Leaves in Beijing

by Armando Ortiz

Two shadows were following me last night, giving the body a shivering fright. I turned around to see who was behind, but it was the street lights casting two shadows in the night. Walking home, and hearing noises scattering from the sides, the breeze sweeping the autumn leaves on the floor, but out of sight.

At a distance a black cat ran, crossing my path looking for cover, becoming a discarded newspaper twisting, scattering, and making my thoughts stutter. Discarded rubbish blown along, like dark ocean waves, became black tarantulas that crawled on the ground.

Later, I woke up in a cold sweat to the clanging of the metal door- late October, when winds shake pots and pans past the midnight hour. Traffic lights and flag poles shaking and resonating like a lone drumstick that lands on a snare drum.

On that crisp and starry night, I was afraid that death would soon take hold, and blind me with nightmare dreams while locked inside an endless dawn. Even if living on an island I would not be at peace, because something was haunting, but the mind remained clueless to what that could be.

In Beijing, amongst retired folk that woke up early to do their morning taichi is where I lived, frosty breaths blending with dawn’s flowing air. They seemed unfazed with nature’s change that was in the air, and moved their arms as if spinning and mixing clay-wares.

It was like being in a Bergman film, where I was supposed to see my body stiff, but then the next day the heater came on, and the warmth of my home, became a shelter of safety from the cold crawling into every corner of the city.

The last days of autumn, when the warm colors that trees wear fall to the ground, and brown dead leaves 

announce the blistering winter’s arrival, who with sweeping broom sounds, rakes away all that has passed, 

bringing a stiffening cold season that will refuse to move fast.

One Day You Will Remember: Short Piece

One day you will remember

By Armando Ortiz

One day you will remember my love and kindness. Seasonal winds will begin to shift south, heading toward distant reserves, and a misty drizzle will be heard from the window, but outside a sun brighter than light will breathe a baking wind on to you. Then a mountain of butterflies will appear on the date when you should recall my words.

On that day, pine trees will become bouquets of orange poppies that hang from every branch, and the hands of our giving mother will unfold as monarchs that rest on green needles sharing memories of us with every flap of their wings.

It will be a clear autumn day, where delicate yellow like leaves will remain suspended in midair, never to touch ground, under a noon sun. Despite this broken heart, harvester butterflies will pass you bye, and then, when I’m no longer here, they will whisper these words, “My love for you was an endangered phenomenon.”

Tao Lin's Taipei: Book Review

"Mandala 15" by Tao Lin

Tao Lin’s Taipei: Review

By Armando Ortiz

If novelists were to be rappers then the one writer that stands out above all rappers today is Tao Lin. There have been some people in the internet that have compared his current novel, Taipei to Drake’s Nothing Was Same, but I won’t be doing that here. Nope, Tao Lin is the equivalent to an underground rapper like Pimp C, Curren$y or Danny Brown. Lin is a great storyteller like many that tell their stories of drug infused orgies and adventures. In Taipei, the main character, Paul, is a young up and coming writer who embarks on various trips to promote his book, taking road trips to other nearby cities or traveling to visit family in other states and outside the country. Paul’s drugs of choice are pills of the prescription kind that are used today, but tend to be highly addictive. He takes excessive amounts of Adderall, Xanax or other anxiety and depression type prescription drugs. He also infuses these drug trips with mushrooms, LSD, and excessive marijuana smoking, activities which most rappers talk about these days.

Tao Lin

I had come across Tao Lin while reading an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago, it must have been the book review section of the newspaper. I was impressed by what I read, prompting me to look his name up using Wikipedia, discovering his blog, which I briefly read, and leading me to purchase a copy of Taipei. Paul is trying to make a name for himself and is enjoying relative fame amongst the literary and art crowd of New York. In addition to being a writer, Paul is going through a bad breakup that has kept him in the pits for the last few months. Despite that he goes to various gatherings that his friends organize where he mingles with other up and comers. Swimming through the house parties that he’s invited to, Paul ends up meeting a new chick at one of these events, and suddenly his wit and conversational prowess are revived. In many ways she becomes his new, yet elusive, muse. The tension that sprouts between this new and emerging relationship is what truly drives the story, since this new and relative unknown is what gives Lin’s novel another level of interest, engaging the reader not only through his creative and long descriptions of dinners and city life, but giving the reader a glimpse into the tensions in dating and relationships in our contemporary world.

Paul seems apprehensive about the relationship, displaying his fear that what is happening might turn into a disappointment and lead to a breakup. Nonetheless there is a glimmer of hope that emerges within the story and we see instances of general happiness, and satisfaction with his new partner. On the other hand, both characters like to engage in some heavy recreational drug use which results in hours of sleeping in his tiny room or simply spending hours together but on each other’s computers and communicating via text, email or instant messaging. Their excesses signals that their relationship might end up being toxic, but Paul and his girl still don’t know what will happen with them even after returning from a trip abroad.

Taipei by Tao Lin

In many ways Lin describes not only contemporary life in an American city, but also shows the realities that come with being connected to the internet, having portable electronic devices, which in many ways depersonalize people. On the other hand, Paul has a broad selection of drugs at his disposal- instantly. Some of these drugs, because they are prescription drugs, manage to leave the country with him becoming an intricate channel. At some point in the story Paul and his girlfriend spend a few days in Taipei, Taiwan wandering the malls and spending a memorable drug infused trip inside and outside a McDonald’s all of which is captured in their digital camera.

The reason why Lin could be considered an underground rapper is because throughout the story his character keeps true to himself, albeit a bit depressive and more than half of the time on some pill. Yet what he describes is no different than what rappers, like Danny Brown talk about in most of their songs. Brown, like Lin, tells stories about his life in Detroit and his surroundings in the many mixtapes, Detroit State of Mind 3, Detroit State of Mind 4,It’s A Art, Hot Soup and albums XXX, and Old that have been released via the internet. His body of work describes life in such detail that it's undeniable that he has lived those tales or else why would he be sharing them to the public. This same logic follows other better known rappers like A$AP Rocky who describe life in New York, though a slightly different version of it but with the same amount of drugs and though they might not frequent the bars and hangouts of highbrow writers their experiences are very similar.

Rapper Danny Brown

One immediately might wonder how it is that a person being a writer can in any way have similar experiences as rappers that claim to come from the hood. Well, aside from the idea that with a demand there is a supply or vice versa it creates a fringe where all worlds meet. Either way, both seem to make a dynamic that is both experienced by those walking in the realms of high or low culture. At the end of the day a lot of what Danny Brown talks about is very similar to what Tao Lin manages to paint in his novel. The individual living in the city surrounded by all kinds of different realities, and yet despite their drug infused bodies at times being numbed by the drugs, have a persistent desire to write and to publish, putting in the ground work required of any emerging writer or rapper.

The crowds that Lin brings, are the same size of many of the underground rappers, so why is it that these people, these writers manage to bring crowds that maybe in their everyday life pass each other as they walk down a sidewalk, each going their own way, maybe shopping at corner stores for snacks like Cheetos and sodas or patronizing places like Wholefoods or Lawsons. These underground artists like Danny Brown along with Tao Lin talk about things that affect everyone on a daily basis, from the teenager that attends secondary school to the published author walking his dog, they experience love and heartbreak which is intimately connected to an individual through aloneness and loneliness, and is either suppressed or intensified by heavy drug use. 

James Joyce's Dubliners: Essay

James Jocye’s Dubliners: Essay

By Armando Ortiz

I learned about James Joyce through a classmate. We were taking the same Biology course at Los Angele City College back in the late 90’s. Just mentioning that seems a bit frightening, since it was almost twenty years ago. We were inside a Salvadoran restaurant, eating pupusas, sharing stories. He’d traveled through Russia and Eastern Europe, enjoyed drawing what he saw, instead of writing. He’d been born in South Korea, and was planning to transfer to UCLA.  Somehow he began to talk about James Joyce’s Ulysses and how it was the best novel he had ever read. Since then I kept coming across Joyce’s name, and more importantly I became somewhat familiar with the book, so while reading Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey I knew that there was some link between those epic stories and Joyce. It took several books and years, tackling several of Pynchon’s novels and reading several of Roberto Bolano’s novels before arriving at Joyce. I’d been challenged by Bolano’s writings, and the interviews that you can see on YouTube, so I made it a point to finally read Joyce. Ever since then I’ve read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and more recently Dubliners. This essay will mainly be on Dubliners, and will focus on a few themes presented in Joyce’s collection of short stories.

Dubliners

We live in a time where everything seems to have a quick solution despite the fact that many things require time and energy to maintain, the main one being our bodies which over time deteriorates. If you turn your computer or television on, in less than thirty minutes you will come across advertisements that promote renewed and prolonged virility, natural hair regrowth, more testosterone, Botox, plastic surgery, skin whitening creams and so many other things related to aging and our bodies. For a few years now some have looked into what steroids to take before beginning a bodybuilding workout program so that in a few months they can bulk up and be a completely different person. Different fad diets also claim to have unimaginable results that guarantee healthy but drastic weight loss in just a few weeks. In light of all these promises James Joyce’s Dubliners becomes ever more relevant today than when it was written back one hundred years ago.

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories that contains characters who vary from elderly men to children, and of people who fall in love or are tricked into relationships. These stories all contain their own plots and internal allegories, so it is difficult to explain each one, and doing so would wipe away any chance for future readers discovering for themselves the magic of Joyce’s story telling power. After reading his stories there is a greater awareness of the overall cycle that life offers to every person on this earth. While reading his stories one cannot help to see that what he shares with the readers is relevant and that the themes have much more to do with human nature than anything else. Although some claim that these stories have a nationalist bent he reveals an intimate and human side to these stories. Joyce captures the general social atmosphere of Ireland during the early years of the twentieth century, but it generally serves as a backdrop to the stories that he has to tell about people’s lives and the feelings, thoughts and emotions that they experience.

James Joyce

The first story has a scene where an old man sits relaxing, reflecting on life when he sees some children that most likely cut school. He engages them in conversation, and the generation gap is obvious, but that is the general trend in every society, yet it gives a glimpse into something that rarely happens, except maybe in schools or hospitals. You have an elderly person questioning and talking to youth in a manner that seems almost day to day. Another story has several memorable instances, but only one will be discussed here. There is a party that takes place in a house, and the ladies, all well past their youth, are busy serving people and trying to help out with the dinner party. They are described in such an elegant and lively manner that makes getting older an experience of further maturity, but also of a meaningful expression and engagement with people of all ages. Though the story ends on a different note that will not be discussed here there is a sense within Joyce’s writing that there is a wrestling of ideas and manners of expression with every passing generation. This might be one of his overall themes in all his writings, since most of the novels deal with memory, aging, youth and the generation gap between those that have lived life and those starting their lives. Everyone is trying to claim their right to existence, but it is done in a manner that allows the reader to appreciate the society that they live in. Yet, when you look around today, most of the messages that we get is that aging is bad, and that there are ways to remedy that instead of a message that states that with age comes wisdom, but also further engagement with society.

Dubliners is more relevant today than in the past because it seems that in today’s world there seems to be this desire to sweep the idea of growing, especially in Los Angeles, under the floor and ignore the fact that it is one of the longer and more memory filled times for all people. Aside from the passing of time that everyone has to come to grips, Joyce also focuses on love, and all its different manifestations, from a person using love as a way to get the other person’s money, or making the relationship between mother and father, where love has been slowly vanishing, but commitment to the relationship remains strong it to make a covenant in staying away from deviant behaviors, yet again we have the idea of love and what the other person who is currently committed had experienced previously, things like love and happiness.

Joyce certainly had a knack is capturing these moments in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where Stephen Dedalus has an amusing conversation with one of the main teachers of the school he attends, and there one sees the struggle between letting the will of youth dictate decisions and the wisdom of will experienced to guide the youth. Along those same lines, in Ulysses Stephen reappears, spending a day in discussion with various people throughout Dublin, ending up in Leopold Bloom’s living room in conversation. Later Mr. and Mrs. Bloom are in bed and the story quickly turns the tables on the reader to take on a different perspective of reality. Finally, Dubliners bring into focus the reality that ultimately our lives are lived individually and our experiences remain only within us, be it a memory of a past moment in time that we cherish and never share with anyone else, even our intimate lovers. However, it is through our interactions with people around us that we end up having our most treasured and cherished memories.

Illustration by Chip Zdarsky