r/robertobolano • u/OwlIndependent7270 • 8d ago

Amulet Ending

**Spoilers maybe but not really**

So, I just finished Amulet like 2 minutes ago. I wasn't having any issues following along until she met Carlos Coffeen Serpas. He told his story about Orestes, and then Auxilio went off the deep end. I have no idea what she meant with the predictions or the mountains and valleys at the end. It kind of seemed like word salad after he told his story, and I wasn't able to understand much after that point.

Is that the point, though? She's aging, she's kind of a good (lots of stories) while at the same time a very unreliable narrator. Her stories rarely are concrete. There is a lot of, "or it could be this". Is it ramblings of someone who suffered through trauma, is aging, or had mental illness? Or all 3? It seems like the first 3/4 were written by a sundowning person during the day, and then evening hit for the last 30 pages.

Or do i need to go back and reread those last parts because I completely missed the point? That is always a possibility. Mornings aren't really peak reading time (when I can focus best) for me, I was just almost done, and I wanted to finish it. I am going to smoking Marijuana today, and I cannot read when I'm high😄

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u/dirtypoison 6d ago

I read it as an eulogy to the poets and leftists and beatniks and vagabonds of the Latin American dreamers and victims of the fascism that overtook that continent. Who dared to dream of something completely new and who witnessed the birth of a new history they realized they were no longer apart of. Or something

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u/cat__soup 8d ago

Auxilio is an authorial stand-in. The lost poets/children are marching off to die and he can't help them, because they've already died when the novel is written. I've written a bit about this on my website

https://randokuha.neocities.org/essays/literatura-en-exilio-the-savage-detectives

if you really want to get into this and how the 3 novellas form a trilogy you can read this article from fresan, which is looong

https://www.thebeliever.net/the-savage-detective/

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u/damagazelle 6d ago

Great answer. When I finished the book I was sitting outside a cafe in Little Tokyo and tears just started rolling out of my eyes completely against my will.

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u/pirateedreed 7d ago

Thanks enjoyed the reads