Books

The Watchmen – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The Watchmen is, perhaps, the best comic book movie ever made. It is a large qualification and one that does the movie a disservice, but despite the reworking of the typical comic book themes and an ending that avoids the superhero defeats super villain formula, some elements still cannot escape the genre and make the film a little awkward at times.

Based on the 1986 graphic novel, The Watchmen tells the story of a group of super heroes that were anything but the clean cut exemplars of American culture that Superman represents. Instead, in an excellent title sequence you learn how some were killed in scandalous ways, one ended up in a mental hospital, and others resorted to drink. It is a foretelling of the scandals, immoral behavior and the self righteous crusading. One of the great strengths of the film is to see superheroes as something other than heroic. When The Comedian shoots and murders his pregnant lover in Vietnam because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her, it is a moment that undoes the whole facade of the heroic and makes the comic fantasies that have come before seem silly. What is worse is the all powerful Dr. Manhattan doesn’t do anything. Superman with his perfect sense of right and wrong has been replaced by a hero who is too unconcerned with the problems of everyday people.

The movie, too, avoids the usual convention where the super villain fights the super hero in a battle that goes on for five to ten minutes and millions of dollars of special effects. For the all the complexity that the super heroes might exhibit, the film in the end comes down to the grand battle, which is really a let down because it seldom has anything to do with the characters the heroes have. The Watchmen, on the other hand, avoids the problem because the conclusion of the film is based in a moral ambiguity: can one kill millions to save billions. Sure there is a fight between the heroes but it comes to nothing and only proves they dislike each other. It is a relief to see the lack of a grand show down, because it makes the movie about decisions, not power. If everything is about one’s powers then it doesn’t matter how complex the character is (or how mopey they are, which seems to be the case usually), it is the luck of the one’s powers, which naturally always tilts towards the good, that defines the movie and the characters.

The Watchmen is an excellent representative of a narrative imagination that was common in the 80’s where the extremes of right leads one to see concentration camps coming any day now. In The Watchmen there is a sense that the government would be completely happy to start building the camps to deal with the restless people. Both the Comedian and Rorschach are quite the right leaning vigilantes who see nothing good in the scum of the world as it has descended in to a cesspool of criminality. It is the same fear that shows up in various American punk bands of the time such as the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and the Suicidal Tendencies. In each there is a preoccupation with government power that turns fascistic.

The Watchmen, though, has its flaws. Its length is not necessarily one, although some may suggest 3 hours is excessive. The biggest problem is it can’t escape its comic book past. For all the cleverness in rewriting the genre it still uses conventions of the genre. So, at times the narration is weak, a cross between Raymond Chandler and a teenage kid when Rorschach is narrating, and boring when Dr. Manhattan is narrating. Moreover, Rorschach’s insights into human nature are quite tedious, as are some of the flashbacks that describe the various back stories. Silk Spectre II and Night Owl are a little light in the characterization department, and rewriting the way women are portrayed in comic books is certainly not the focus of The Watchmen, which is obvious from Silk Spectre’s costume. Having a lesbian character, Silhouette, only servers to underscore the male fantasy that is at work in the characterizations (granted, she is also the victim of a hate crime). Finally, Silk Spectre I could be quite a complex character, but loving one’s abuser is simplified so much that it suggests if you try to rape someone you may still have chance to have her fall in love with you. If one is going to embrace that theme, you really should dig deeper.

The best comic movie is probably a turn off to those who don’t care about the genre, either in film or the comic books themselves. Yet it is worth seeing if only to understand how far comics have and have not come over the years. Despite the seeming silliness of costumed heroes they are one of the great American inventions.

The Kindle 2 and Usability – Not There Yet

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Jakob Nielsen at UseIt.com has devoted his last two newsletters to reviewing the usability of the Kindle. In the first he talked about the user experience and in the second how one should write for the Kindle. I have seen many articles that talk about the Kindle in terms of free speech issues and the publishing trade, but not too many that talk about how easy it is to use, which is really going to sell the thing.

Nielsen’s take is mixed.

Amazon’s new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content.

He generally likes it for reading fiction, but finds it clumbsy for non fiction or grahically heavy text.

Kindle works poorly for non-fiction books that have many illustrations or that require users to frequently refer back and forth between sections. Even if Kindle had a color screen, heavily illustrated books would still be better in print because moving around in Kindle is awkward. My own books fall into this category, so even though I’d like to sell more books, I can’t really recommend that you buy them for Kindle. My latest book is available in Kindle format, so you can download a free chapter and try for yourself (and then buy it in print 🙂

His biggest complaint is the way you move around the screen.

Interacting through the Kindle 5-way feels much like many mid-level smartphone user interfaces, though the 5-way is worse than a BlackBerry mini-trackball.

Furthermore, Kindle is slow. Every time you enter a command, it ponders the situation before acting. Even turning the page takes slightly longer than it should, and all other actions are definitely sluggish.

In short: Awkward pointing + slow reaction = a bad user experience that discourages people from exploring and attempting different tasks.

Ultimately it seems that personal privacy issues aside, the Kindle still needs some work and until the book metaphor is done away with, the e-books may be problematic.

The usability problem with non-linear content is crucial because it indicates a deeper issue: Kindle’s user experience is dominated by the book metaphor. The idea that you’d want to start on a section’s first page makes sense for a book because most are based on linear exposition. Unfortunately, this is untrue for many other content collections, including newspapers, magazines, and even some non-fiction books such as travel guides, encyclopedias, and cookbooks.

His articles are definately worth a look.

Some Thoughts the Spanish Civil War and American Imagination

~ bythefirelight

The TLS had a good review of an interesting book about western Journalists during the Spanish Civil War. It is a good reminder of just how popular the war was as an image of communism, socialism, and fascism. The image would carry that weight for many years into the cold war, long past the books that first spawned those images. Yet those images, too, took on a new life too after World War II, when the cold war began to intensify.

George Orwell, though not American, seemed to best exemplify this. His twin works about the communism, Homage to Catalonia and 1984, are emblematic of an argument that would last until the end of the Cold War. If on the one hand you have the totalitarian state as described in 1984 and Homage to Catalonia , how is it, then, possible to support anything the least bit socialist? Didn’t Orwell show in Homage to Catalonia just how naive he was to support the Soviet side? Although who lost China was a greater rallying cry during the early Cold War, Orwell’s depiction of the perfidy during the Civil War certainly helped crystallize the image of intractableness.The irony has always been that Orwell was still committed to socialism, and throughout Homage to Catalonia is the notion that socialism still has a role in Government.

Hemingway besides giving the reader a grand adventure in For Whom the Bell Tolls, also gives us apolitical novel. The Russian commissar who is so cold and calculating in the novel is a real person and like Orwell, Hemingway is wants everyone to know that the brave were betrayed by the communists. Unlike Orwell, though, he doesn’t really care about defending socialism, just the lost cause and the bravery of man at his finest—at least as Hemingway sees it.

The way a war can change in significance from confused fight between fascism and communism to fight against fascism to fight against communism in the space of ten years is a wonder. It demonstrates a wild swing in politics that I think is sometimes lost when thinking about the American books of that time.

Interviews With Juan Rulfo

~ bythefirelight

Youtube can be a wonder sometimes. I found all these interviews with Juan Rulfo. His way of speaking is different, but reflects his writing to some degree.

I’d Like – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

I’d Like is not just a collection of stories, but a way telling them that is fresh and reinvigorates the form. Amanda Michalopoulou has constructed a reinforcing set of insights into story telling that is not consumed in the tediums of art about itself. The focus on reworking how stories are told does not hobble the stories, though, instead it adds an element of mystery and metaphysical shifting as if the epiphanies and narrative truths that so permeate the genre once reached are then undone as the story is revealed to be part of something different. The revelation shifts the meaning of the stories and ultimately the conclusions one can draw about the stories.

Michalopoulou, though, is writing neither theory nor dense esoteric investigations. Instead she uses a sparse prose that features fleating references to other stories or other characters. She seldom describes the environment her characters inhabit; description would distract from the multiplicity of voices and root them into conventional frames. She also uses first person only to make the stories float into each other. It is not always clear at first who is speaking. Is it a character in a story as it is in the eponymous I’d Like, or is it the character of the author who talks to her story—one surprisingly similar to I’d Like—in a restaurant and argues about whether it is full of clichés? It is an instant critique of what seemed like a good story of a marriage grown tiresome and an escape to New York. There is an air of disappointment in her thoughts

Ever since she was born I only read short stories. Novels are like murals would take a lifetime to finish one. And poetry makes my hormonal issues even worse. I sit there and cry because Hermes, who wanted to be a perfumer, suddenly dies at age twenty-seven, in a Syrian seaport. Or because the sy is a blue and gold mistake.

Short stories suit new mothers who love to read. They open the back door for you, let you peek in at reddish beards, chambermaids, women who turn into tables. You sign into an imaginary neck and it’s over.

Clearly, Michalopoulou is interested in story telling, yet there is a connection not only to the everyday experience of the reader, but the experience of the characters of her stories. The story is grounded in the actual, but still how the story is told is important.

I’d Like also uses reoccuring images to to work the conections between the stories into the reader’s mind. The connections are subtle and serve to add curiosity—didn’t that appear a couple stories ago—rather than function as clues to that weave a complete narrative together. A red barrette, for example, is stolen from the top of a corpse on a gurney. It is a impulsive act, but in most stories it would be just a stream of consciouses moment that doesn’t mean too much. Latter, though, the barrette appears as the trademark hat of a beloved sister. The sister though, is based on someone the writer knows. The barrette functions, then, as a narrative image for the stories that are written by the character of the author, the influence that links the character of the author’s reality with her stories, and a narrative image for the reader that links each of the different realties—the fiction and the meta fiction—to each other.

Thematically, Michalopoulou’s stories revolve around the lives of the character of the writer and two sisters and their family. The two sisters come and go through the stories at different ages and phases of life. The glimpses are brief and give just enough of the tensions that exist between siblings. The tensions, though, are not banal or insipid, but reveal the way siblings interact in simple every day ways. The writer’s theme is about writing, not so much about what makes good writing, but what it is from one’s own life that becomes writing. Michalopoulou, too, is interested in how the writing reflects back on to the writer. If a story effects the reader, can’t a story effect the writer. Again, it is the criss crossing of narrative realties that becomes one of the themes.

Michalopoulou can be a funny writer and Light is the best and funniest story in the collection. One of the sisters loses her sister in a car crash and the day she learns about the accident two Mormons come to her door. Feeling lonely, she invites them in and they talk. She doesn’t know anything about mormonism, but she keeps having the Mormons back to her home to talk and pray even though she doesn’t really care that much. At the end of the story her sister returns in a dream. She ask sher sister

“Did Moroni send you?”
“No, your gulability did.”

The levity underscores the tension between the sisters, whose separation has been much trouble for the survivor. The balance between the humor and the sadness is perfectly balanced and quite funny. It is part of the playfulness of the stories that make them so good.

I’d Like is a great collection of stories that blends genres and styles to create a unique collection of stories that moves short story writing past the problem becomes realization formula.

Yu Hua at Elliott Bay Book Co

~ bythefirelight

Yu Hua was at Elliott Bay Book Co on March 1st. He is promoting his new book Brothers and is on a tour of the states. Since it is rare to have access to an author like him, especially since he doesn’t speak English, it was a treat to see him. He is a funny man even with an interpreter and has a good sense of the dark. He made a few comments that are of special interest.

  1. He picks his translators himself. Although he doesn’t speak English he looks for someone who knows the literature of the target language. He isn’t as interested in the Chinese scholars who only know about Chinese literature. He is more interested in having the readers be able to read the book, than a pure translation.
  2. Since he went to school during the Cultural Revolution his education was hindered. Therefore, when he began to write he only knew about 4000 characters. The lack of characters led to a sparse writing style. He said from a bad thing came a good thing.
  3. Like a good cook who  is made better by eating many different types of food; a writer who samples good writing will become better.
  4. He has been lucky to live in a land where changes that have taken place over the last 40 years in China, took 400 years to occur in Europe.
  5. His father was a surgeon whose surgery was in the same building as their house and the morgue was next to the bathroom. Occasionally, he would sleep in the morgue because it was cool. He can remember seeing his father covered in blood from surgeries. These memories informed his early works with violence. He also told a little joke wondering what made the trees near the house grow so well, the bathroom or the morgue.
  6. When Mao died he said the sound of 1000 people sobbing sounded ridiculous, not sad. He couldn’t keep from laughing. So he put his head down on the stool in front of him. He was shaking from the laughter so much that the teachers thought he was crying the hardest.

Young Punks of Spanish Language Fiction

~ bythefirelight

El País had an article about three young authors recently. Naturally as with any article about young authours, there is the sense of we are here to over throw the past. They are not interested in Fuentes at all, in part because his 80th birthday with such fanfare. Fuentes is to these writers as Paz was to Bolaño.

Their writing sounds interesting to some degree. It is full of violence and possibly reflects a world that has seemed to get more violent recently. For the Mexican author it makes sense; the others I don’t know.

In the three [novels] in one way or another, you find violent characters. More perhaps in Busqued’s, thanks to the brutal Duarte who is an ex soldier, kidnapper, abuser, and obsessed with hardcore sex; but not less than the others. If no, there is el violent behavior of Isabel, the daughter of the protagonist of Morella’s work, a woman that has no doubts in mistreating and kidnapping her own father. Or Golo, protagonists of Maldonado’s work, the violent one, violent in its details, in its sex, in its relation with the world. Can one write these days without touching on the subject?

En las tres, de una u otra manera, se encuentran personajes violentos. Más quizás en la de Busqued, gracias al personaje brutal de Duarte, ex militar, secuestrador, abusador, obseso del sexo hardcore; pero no menos en las otras. Si no, ahí está el violento comportamiento de Isabel, la hija del protagonista de la obra de Morella, una mujer que no duda en maltratar y secuestrar a su propio padre. O Golo, absoluto protagonista en la de Maldonado, violento ena de Maldonado, violento en los detalles, en el sexo, en su relación con el mundo. ¿Se puede escribir hoy en día sin abordar el tema?

Waltz With Bashir at The World

~ bythefirelight

The World: World Book podcast has an interview with the artist for the graphic novel version of Waltz With Bashir. Quite interesting, especially the question if the book is just trying to cash in on the movie.

Review of Modern Arabic Fiction in Al-Ahram

~ bythefirelight

There is a good review of the Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthologyin Al-Ahram Weekly. Of particular interest is the process the editor used in having the stories translated. Instead of translating them all herself she uses a team.

Likewise, in her anthologies, she argues that only poets can render poetry and only fiction writers can render fiction from another language. Thus she is adamant about having two translators for each work: a scholar and a native speaker from the original to English, revised by a writer in the target language, with her editing the final version to make sure that no stylistic or semantic errors have crept in.

Jayyusi acquainted herself with the literary scene in the US and UK and got to know personally many English-speaking creative writers and convinced them to partake in her many projects of translation.

The article also comments on the selection of the authors and the quality of the translations. Since Gamal Al-Ghitani has just won the Zayed prize the reviewer’s descrption sounds even more intriguing.

Jayyusi’s approach to Arabic fiction is marked by an analysis of its content and technique. In content, she sees fiction as a reflection of the turbulent history of modern Arabs, with hopes and dreams followed by disappointments and breakdowns — what she calls a sense of the apocalyptic. She points to a few names that stand out as models of certain trends in Arabic fiction: the Saudi ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif for his petrofiction depicting how oil has changed the ecology and the culture of the Gulf; the Egyptian Gamal al-Ghitani for his sophisticated use of time — mythical time in Kitab al-Tajalliyat (Book of Revelations) and historical time in Zayni Barakat ; the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani for his sense of space and loss of place; the Egyptian Edward al-Kharrat as a modernist and an experimentalist; the Palestinian Ibrahim Nasralla as venturing into postmodernism; and the Iraqis Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman and Fu’ad al-Takarli for depicting the individual struggling against prevailing moeurs. As for the short story, Jayyusi concentrates in her introduction on two figures, the Egyptian Yusuf Idris and the Syrian Zakaria Tamir. Needless to say dozens of others are mentioned, including Ibrahim al-Koni and Radwa Ashour.

Sudan Novelist Tayeb Salih Dies

~ bythefirelight

Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih died. The BBC has an article about him. The Leonard Lopate Show has an appreciation last summer of his work Season of Migration to the North, which I will be reading soon. It sounds truly worth reading.

Best Sellers in Chile February 5 to 11

~ bythefirelight

It wouldn’t be any worse than the best seller lists in the States except they had to import the nonsense that fills their charts. It is too bad globalization means even your local hack has to worry about being outsourced.

Gamal al-Ghitani Wins Zayed Book Award in Literature

~ bythefirelight

Gamal al-Ghitani won the Zayed Book Award for Literature recently. I don’t know how important the award is (are any awards important?) but there is a nice list of his works. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know what the Arabic names are, not that I can speak Arabic, but it makes it a little easier to compare different lists of his books. It also makes it easier for to figure out which books of his I have read. I only see three listed that I have read:  Zayni Barakat; Pyramid texts; Naguib Mahfooz Remembers. I have also read the collection of stories A Distress Call and the novel Incidents in Zanfrani Alley, or as it is known in German, Der safranische Fluch oder Wie Impotenz die Welt verbessert, which, if you can believe Google, means Saffron curse or how the world improves impotence, certainly a more fun sounding title and one that gives you a better sense of the book. As far as I know there is also one story in the collection Sardines and Oranges and one in the Columbia Modern Arabic Fiction, both of which I’ll be reading this year. A Distress Call and Incidents in Zanfrani Alley are almost impossible to find. I’ve never found them on the Internet. Fortunately, there is a large university near by if I were to want to read them again.

For someone who is one has been called one of the great Arabic fiction writers, it is too bad more isn’t translated. But then again since so little is translated it is a wonder this many of his works have been translated. I have posted a review of  Naguib Mahfooz Remembers (published as The Mahfouz Dialogs).

Fiction:

  • Chronicles of a Young Man Who Lived a Thousand Years Ago
  • Al Zayni Barakat
  • Pyramid texts
  • Siege from Three Directions
  • Stranger’s Tales
  • Book of Revelations (3 vols.)
  • Midnight of Exile
  • Jungles of the Town

Studies:

  • Watchmen of Eastern Gate
  • Naguib Mahfooz Remembers
  • Mustafa Ameen Remembers
  • Views of Cairo a Thousand Years Ago
  • Endowments in Cairo
  • Pigeon Fever

Lobo Antunes to Write Only One More Novel

~ bythefirelight

EL PAÍS notes that António Lobo Antunes is going to stop writing after his next novel.

António Lobo Antunes announced yesterday that he will write a novel to “round out his works” and that after he will not publish anything more. In the declaration published yesterday by Diário de Notícias, the Portuguese writer confirmed that after Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar?, the book he is finishing now and will publish in October, he will begin another novel that he thinks he will finish after two you years of work and then after “that will be the end of novels, articles, everything; I will not publish anything more. My voice, spoken or written, will not be heard again. “

António Lobo Antunes anunció ayer que escribirá una novela para “redondear su obra” y que después no publicará más. En unas declaraciones publicadas ayer por Diário de Notícias, el escritor luso afirma que tras Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar?, el libro que está terminando y publicará en octubre, empezará una novela que calcula que le llevará dos años de trabajo y que luego “se acabaron las novelas, las crónicas, todo, no publico nada más. Mi voz, hablada o escrita, no se volverá a escuchar”.

Sad if it is true, but I wonder how can one know they only have one more novel left in them.

Vilnius Poker – A Brief Review

~ bythefirelight

I just finished reading Vilnius Poker from Open Letter Press. It is a great book, the work of a great writer. When you read a book this good you think, I wonder how many other great books are locked away in the vaults of languages I don’t know and will never know.

I will have a full review at the Quarterly Conversation in April.

Waltz With Bashir in the Nation

~ bythefirelight

The Nation has a large selection of panels from the Waltz With Bashir graphic novel.

Part 1

Part 2

Waltz With Bashir at Words Without Borders

~ bythefirelight

Words Without borders is featuring graphic novels this month and included in collection are several pages from the graphic novel of Waltz With Bashir. The pages capture the same fearfulness as the film and are a good taste if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

They also include an interview with David Polonsky, the artist behind the film. Of particular interest to me were so of his stylisic choices.

“The script said there were flares over the camp,” said Polonsky. “I remembered the flares from Haifa, where I grew up. The navy would always hold maneuvers, and they would shoot up these flares into the sky that painted the whole town dark orange. So this was my starting point, this memory. I later developed it into a motif, with the same orange flame appearing in the eyes of the mad dogs and in the sky. Then, in the end, when the flares burst out and take over everything in Sabra and Shatila, it’s like a repressed memory of violence erupting and burning everything underneath the sky.”

Wolf Totem Becomes Management Handbook

~ bythefirelight

Bruce Humes notes that the Chinese novel Wolf Totem, has spawned a wave of management books extolling the virtues of wolf-think.

[…] the idea that Chinese people ought to “discard their submissive character and assume a more aggressive, or wolf-like, outlook on life and the world at large” (Poon’s words) has caught on like wild-fire in certain circles in China: Featured at business forums, a popular new year’s present for military types — and an inspiration to China’s business publishers.

It is always fascinating what bit of culture can inspire the latest bit of management nonsense.

Chinese Muslim’s Pilgrimage to al-Andalus – Synopsis Posted

~ bythefirelight

Bruce Hume posted his synopsis of a Chinese Muslim’s Pilgrimage to al-Andalus. Well worth the read if you are interested in Spanish culture. It is also interesting to see how someone from China manifests their hispanofilism.

Written over several years and six visits to al-Andalus (Morocco, Portugal and southern Spain),  we see how Zhang Cheng-Zhi discovers the links between the Moors and China, from the Uighurs in Xinjiang to the port of Quanzhou in Fujian, to the prevalence of fig trees in China’s northwest. Increasingly fascinated by the spirit of the Muslim conquerors, their irrigation technology, and the olive trees so prevalent in southern Spain, he actually tries to transplant them to northwest China. His experiment fails, but his clumsy efforts to somehow grow the olive in China, a fruit rendered sacred by its mention in an oft-repeated Koranic verse (see Chapter 17, below), is an almost desperate attempt to bring part of his beloved al-Andalus back home.

Best Sellers in China 2008

~ bythefirelight

Paper Republic pointed me to Bruce Hume’s list of Chinese best sellers. Most are not in English and won’t make much of an impression. There are some interesting books that sound a little odd.

The Tibet Code (4)—He Ma: Latest volume in long-winded tale of mysterious Tibet which begins with sighting of rare Tibetan mastiff. All four volumes best sellers.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was number 25 this year, too.

Bolaño in La Jornada

~ bythefirelight

There was a good article about Bolaño in La Jornada’s Sunday supplement this week talking about Bolaño’s views of exile. According to Gustavo Ogarrio, Bolaño didn’t really believe in political exile because it made him a victim, which he was not. He also thought it was pointless to be nostalgic about the old country

“Can you be nostalgic for a country where you were about to die? Can you be nostalgic for the poverty, the intolerance, the arrogance, the injustice? The refrain intoned by Latin Americans and also by other writers in other poor or traumatized zones carries on the nostalgia, the return to the country of birth, and to me this has always sounded like a lie.”

“¿Se puede tener nostalgia por la tierra en donde uno estuvo a punto de morir? ¿Se puede tener nostalgia de la pobreza, de la intolerancia, de la prepotencia, de la injusticia? La cantinela, entonada por latinoamericanos y también por escritores de otras zonas depauperadas o traumatizadas, insiste en la nostalgia, en el regreso al país natal, y a mí eso siempre me ha sonado a mentira.”

The article goes on to talk about the novel Amuleto which takes place in Mexico during one of the darker times in recent Mexican history. The link between the dictatorships of Latin America are clear.

The exile, though, is not just political, but literary, yet the literary exile is, too, often over done.

If the novel The Savage Detectives is interpreted and read as the parodic and tragic dissolution of a certain narrative vanguard in Latin America, represented by the search for one of the founding poets of Visceral Realism—Cesárea Tinajero— and the motive for the wild detective investigation of the poets Ulises Lima y Arturo Belano, Amuleto allows another paralel reading, concentrating a parody of the post vanguard in the voice of a melodramatic and earthy poet, Auxilio Lacouture.

Si la novela Los detectives salvajes acepta ser leída e interpretada como la disolución paródica y trágica de cierta narrativa vanguardista en América Latina, representada en la búsqueda de una de las poetas fundadoras del real visceralismo –Cesárea Tinajero–, motivo de la pesquisa detectivesca y salvaje de los poetas Ulises Lima y Arturo Belano, Amuleto admite otra lectura paralela, al concentrar esta parodia postvanguardista en la voz de una poetisa melodramática y telúrica, Auxilio Lacouture.

Roberto Bolaño: los exilios narrados is well worth the read.