I just finished reading Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet, and my god is it the book I’ve been looking for. I love 2666 a lot, and since reading it I’ve read some other Bolaño novels, and while they were quite good and at times great, they didn’t seem linked directly to 2666. Thematically, perhaps in tone and subject too, but they could have been written by different authors.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a profile of, you guessed it, Nazis (ordinary people who supported the Nazis, not politicians in the Nazi party) who could have been friends with Haas, but then again maybe not. The Third Reich seems even less connected to 2666. Of course Nazism is very present in all these works, but that’s a surface similarity.

Amulet is different.

To me, reading it, I thought it was the inverse of 2666 and in a type of secret dialogue with it. The imagery is not just similar, but linked, as if there’s a portal from one work to the other. The most obvious link between the two works is that the year “2666” is only mentioned in Amulet, not the actual novel 2666. The longer work gets its title from the shorter one. That’s what pushed me to read this one, but before reading I wondered if that’d be the only link. Thankfully, it isn’t.

My copy of Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

In Part 1 of 2666, the Critic Liz Norton is in a St. Thersa hotel in Mexico looking at the mirror and sensing a type of portal to an eerie dream world, which is later echoed in Part 4, when the congresswoman is in likely the same hotel room and feeling the same creepy sensation. In Amulet, the narrator, Auxilio Lacouture, has the same sensations when looking at a vase in chapter 1. She describes it as a window to hell and wonders if poets ever see the bottom of it. “Do poets have any idea what lurks in the bottomless maws of their vases? And if they know, why don’t they take it upon themselves to destroy them?”

If this was the only parallel I’d probably shrug it off but the connections felt deeper and linked throughout the work. Auxilio felt to me like the patron saint and protector that many, many characters in 2666 needed but never got. The epigraph of Amulet, to me, supports this reading: “In our misery we wanted to scream for help, but there was no one there to come to our aid—Petronius.”

Auxilio renders service to poets, inspiring their work, attending poetry readings and poetry parties and being one of those indispensable people who fuel culture without getting a byline or credit, but in a more basic sense she sweeps their floors and cleans their homes, just because she wants to, not for pay. She identifies as the mother of all poets repeatedly, and she very well could be.

Lest things seem too abstract or speculative or grasping, as always with Bolaño, he brings us down to earth. Auxilio survives a coup, as the army patrols the campus she works on looking for radicals, taking away students and professors, by hiding for 13 days in a bathroom stall. She survives the violence, the haunting shadows and encroaching darkness, by reading Pedro Gafias’ poetry and eating toilet paper until the hunger disappears. This becomes her time-ship, as she remembers and hallucinates things in different directions in time, but the experience is her “amulet,” which she draws on throughout her life for protection.

Thematic similarities to 2666 are numerous, but in many ways the works aren’t just different but opposite or inverted. 2666 has an omniscient third-person narrator (in interview, Bolaño says the narrator is Arturo Bolano, Roberto Bolaño’s alter ego, but we don’t know that just from reading the book), whereas Amulet is a first-person narrator, told from a woman’s perspective. Amulet is centred with a female perspective, whereas in 2666, women are literally missing from the book. Amulet is very short, while 2666 is a tome.

The Critics in 2666 travel from Europe to Mexico looking desperately for a poet they’ve never met, who it turns out under a different name fought for the Nazis in WWII and is the uncle of a suspect in the contemporary killings of women haunting St. Theresa, whereas Auxilio came to Mexico from Uruguay to fulfill her destiny as the mother of all poets. She travelled from afar to her spiritual home, while the Critics, at the end of that section, are stuck abroad in a hotel, sensing Archimboldi (Hans Reiter) is nearby but they’ll never actually meet him.

I could go on, but I think I’d need to reread Amuelt or mark up passages that for me felt similar, or echoed 2666. Auxilio Lacouture is in Bolaño’s other major, long novel, Savage Detectives. Honestly, I read that years ago and the specifics aren’t fresh at all. I could do a reread of that. I suspect it’d read differently to me now, knowing more about Bolaño, his world, and his fictional worlds. I’m going to reread Amulet too at some point, because it was a lovely lighter read that pointed to darker themes without wallowing in them. If reading 2666 is disturbing but raw and important, this felt like the negative image of that but no less raw and important. It is filled with poetry-prose and beautiful images, one that stuck out to me were eyes like a lake at sunset, but whereas 2666 had some light amid the craziness and the darkness, in Amulet these proportions are reversed. If surviving the coup is Auxilio’s amulet, or protection, she provides the bohemians and artists she encounters with the same type of protection, and maybe even for Bolaño’s readers too.