Amulet

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 6-7 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 08:57 PM This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won't appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 25-26 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:10 PM Maybe it was madness that impelled me to travel. It could have been madness. I used to say it was culture. Of course culture sometimes is, or involves, a kind of madness. Maybe it was a lack of love that impelled me to travel. Or an overwhelming abundance of love. Maybe it was madness.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 6-7 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:13 PM This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won't appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won't seem like that. Although, in fact, it's the story of a terrible crime.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 8 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:14 PM in los detectivos she does say it

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 8 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:15 PM in los detectivos she does say it. at least now we're spared the trouble of trying to construct a single true universe. oh chaos. this ca help with narrative difficulties in the detectives

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 48 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:18 PM write a nonlinear hypertext essay

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 49-50 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:22 PM I began to wonder and even went to look at the vase in question or the aforementioned books and came to the conclusion (a conclusion which, I hasten to add, I promptly rejected) that Hell or one of its secret doors was hidden there in those seemingly inoffensive objects.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 53-54 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:23 PM I'd say to him, Don Pedro, How long have you had this vase? Did someone give it to you? Does it mean something special to you? And he'd just stare at me, at a loss * * for words. Or he'd say: It's only a vase. Or: No, it doesn't have any special meaning.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 63-64 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:24 PM I don't know what happened to me, though I do know what could have happened and didn't.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 64 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 09:26 PM what could have happened? madness? death? the fact that it isnt stated suggests this is a wide open portal straight to the gaping mouth of he horror

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 68-73 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 10:54 PM but I knew (I'm not completely stupid) that it was there, in the room, standing on a shelf beside a silver frog, a frog whose skin seemed to have absorbed all the madness of the Mexican moon. Then, still shaking, I got up and walked over to that vase again, with, I think, the sensible intention of picking it up and smashing it on the floor, on the green tiles of that floor, and this time the path I traced toward the object of my terror was not a spiral but a straight line, admit- * * tedly rather hesitant, but straight nevertheless. And when I was a few feet from the vase, I stopped again and said to myself: If it isn't Hell in there, it's nightmares, and all that is lost, all that causes pain and is better forgotten.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 74-75 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 10:54 PM Then I thought: Does Pedrito Garfias know what's hidden in his vase? 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?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 114-15 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 11:55 AM The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 153-55 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:30 PM And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, you silly girl, you and everyone else; I can still move heaven and earth for love.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 160-67 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:33 PM those brave, troubled boys, those downhearted boys adrift in the nights of Mexico City, those brave boys who turned up with their sheets of foolscap folded in two and their dog-eared volumes and their scruffy notebooks and sat in the cafés that never close or in the most depressing bars in the world, where I was the only woman, except, occasionally, for the ghost of Lilian Serpas (but more about Lilian later), and they gave me their poems to read, their verses, their fuddled translations, and I took those sheets of foolscap and read them in silence, with my back to the table where they were raising their glasses desperately trying to be ingenious or ironic or cynical, poor angels, and I plunged into those words (I can't in all honesty say into that river of words, although I * * would like to, since it wasn't so much a river as an inchoate babble), letting them seep into my very-marrow, I spent a moment alone with those words choked by the brilliance and sadness of youth, with those splinters of a shattered dime-store mirror, and I looked at myself or rather for myself in them, and there I was!

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 168-70 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:33 PM the fact of my selfhood sent a shiver down my spine, plunged me into a sea of doubts, made me anxious about the future, the days approaching at the pace of a cruise ship, although the vision also proved that I was living in and with my time, the time I had chosen, the time all around me, tremulous, changeable, teeming, happy.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 178-80 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:36 PM I was at the university on the eighteenth of September when the army occupied the campus and went around arresting and killing indiscriminately. No. Not many people were killed at the university. That was in Tlatelolco. May that name live forever in our memory!

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 184-86 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:38 PM Now I believe, if you'll excuse a brief digression, that life is full of enigmas, minimal events that, at the slightest touch or glance, set off chains of consequences, which, viewed through the prism of time, invariably inspire astonishment or fear.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 231-32 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:48 PM a special kind of silence prevailed, a silence that figures neither in musical nor in philosophical dictionaries, as if time were coming apart and flying off in different directions simultaneously, a pure time, neither verbal nor composed of gestures and actions.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 232-37 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:49 PM And then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced at his image in the mirror, our two faces embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake, and a shiver ran down my spine, alas, because I knew that for the moment the laws of mathematics were protecting me, I knew that the tyrannical laws of the cosmos, which are opposed to the laws of poetry, were protecting me and that the soldier would stare entranced at his image in the mirror and I, in the singularity of my stall, would hear and imagine him, entranced in turn, and that our singularities, from that moment on, would be joined like the two faces of a terrible, fatal coin.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 251-52 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:54 PM The year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. But it also became the years 1970 and 1973 and the years 1975 and 1976. As if I had died and was viewing the years from an unaccustomed vantage point.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 257-58 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:55 PM And it was strange to be thinking about my teeth, because in a sense I didn't care that I had lost the four most important teeth in a woman's mouth, and yet in another sense their loss had left a deep wound in my being, a burning wound that was necessary and unnecessary, absurd.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 273-75 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:59 PM Now, since I'm not planning to take that secret to the grave (where there's no point taking * * anything), I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love. I lost my teeth on the altar of human sacrifice.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 268-70 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 02:59 PM and no one could say: I have seen the wounded mouth of the woman from Uruguay, I have seen the bare gums of the only person who stayed in the university when it was occupied by the riot police in September 1968.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 280-83 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:00 PM A novel that was later lost or consumed by flames or perhaps it ended up in one of the huge garbage dumps that surround Mexico City; in any case I read it, with reservations at first, but then with pleasure, not because it was good, no, what I liked were the signs of determination on each page, the touching determination of an adolescent: the novel was bad, but he was good.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 276 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:01 PM elsewhereit says sixteen in one place and seventeen in another

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 308-10 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:05 PM Some gossipmongers say that I had a weakness for bathrooms. They couldn't be further from the truth. Bathrooms were a nightmare for me, although since September 1968, I had grown accustomed to nightmares. You can get used to anything. I

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 329-31 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:09 PM Once my teeth went I was timid about kissing and being kissed, and how long can love last without kisses? Even so, I was hungry for sex. A hunger, that's the only word for it. You can't make love without that hunger. You need an opportunity too. But the hunger is the main thing.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 349-51 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:11 PM One afternoon I decided to go to her house, but I got lost. I never get lost! Or at least not since September 1968. Before that, I did occasionally, not very often, lose my way in the labyrinth of Mexico City.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 407-9 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:19 PM Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better. But better can sometimes mean worse, if you're a woman, if you live on this continent, hit upon unhappily by the Spaniards, inopportunely populated by Asians gone astray.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 426-28 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:23 PM From my watchtower, my bloody subway carriage, from my gigantic rainy day. From the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, the timeship from which I can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 429-34 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:25 PM I started looking at the walls and the floor of El Principio de Mexico, and immediately noticed something odd—I always pick up on things like this—a sort of noise, wind or breath, blowing up through the foundations of the café at irregular intervals. And so the minutes went by, with Arturito and Paolo talking about theater, Elena sitting quietly, and me turning my head from time to time, attentive to the receding sounds of what, by then, was undermining not only the Principio de Mexico but the whole city, as if I were being warned a few years in advance or a few centuries too late about the fate of Latin American theater, the double nature of silence, and the collective catastrophe of which improbable sounds are often harbingers.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 448-50 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:27 PM And I opened my mouth, half dead or half asleep, and said, Chido, Elena, quite uncharacteristically using that awful Mexican slang word for great. Chido, chido, chido. How awful. There's something masochistic about Mexican slang. Or sadomasochistic, sometimes.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 457 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:28 PM the Peasant Poets, those four, or three, or five (I forget) horsemen of the Nerudian apocalypse,

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 461 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:31 PM make sure dan doesnt get obsequious

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 476-80 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:36 PM Darío would have learned more; he would have been able to bring Hispanic modernism to a close and begin something new, not the avant-garde as such, but an island, say, between modernism and the avant-garde, what we might now call the non-existent island, an island of words that never were, and could only have come into being (granted that this were even possible) after the imaginary encounter between Darío and Huidobro; and Huidobro himself, after his fruitful encounter with Darío, would have been able to found an even more vigorous avant-garde, what we might name the non-existent avant-garde, which, had it existed, would have transformed us and changed our lives.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 486-88 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:38 PM And, at the risk of overstretching every imagination but my own, which is supreme in its elasticity, I will say that some nights my friends even seemed, for a second, to be the incarnations of those who had never come into existence: the Latin American poets who died in childhood, at the age of five or ten, or just a few months after they were born.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 495-97 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:39 PM Or got up from my chair and left without paying—I never paid, or hardly ever. I was the one who could see into the past and those who can see into the past never pay. But I could also see into the future and vision of that kind comes at a high price: life, sometimes, or sanity.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 504-5 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:41 PM although I was picking my way through craters illuminated by hundreds of moons, they were not the craters of planet Earth but those of Mexico, a distinction that might appear to be, but is not, quite devoid of sense.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 518-19 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:45 PM ah, my friends, now there's another recurring and terribly Latin American nightmare: being unable to find your weapon; you know where you put it, but it's not there. That's just our luck.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 520-25 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:46 PM But when the shadow intent on my death, or at least on inflicting suffering and humiliation, approached the doorway where I had hidden, other shadows appeared in that street, which could have become the epitome of all the terrifying streets I had ever walked down, and called out to me: Auxilio, Auxilio, Socorro, Amparo, Caridad, Remedios Lacouture, Where have you gone? And I recognized the voice of the sad and clever Julián Gómez, while the other, brighter-sounding voice belonged to Arturito Belano, ready for a fight, as always. And then the shadow that was bent on my torment stopped, looked back and walked on, went past me: an ordinary-looking Mexican guy fresh out of the underworld, and with him passed a breath of warm and slightly humid air that conjured up unstable geometries, solitudes, schizophrenia, and butchery, and the absolute son of a bitch didn't even glance at me.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 542 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:50 PM the shadow of death

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 555-57 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 03:52 PM I realized straight away that she was reading her own future, and what she saw in the cards was terrible, but that didn't matter. What mattered was something a little harder to grasp. What mattered was that as she waited for me, alone, she was not afraid.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 578-79 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:28 PM Perhaps Arturito is already dead, I thought, perhaps that lonely valley is an emblem of death, because death is the staff of Latin America and Latin America cannot walk without its staff.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 581-82 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:31 PM I was * * the itinerant mother. The wanderer. Life drew me into other stories.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 600-602 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:47 PM What those poor orphaned strays were saying was incomprehensible to José Agustín, the novelist in fashion at the time, and to the young poets who wanted to overthrow José Emilio Pacheco, and to José Emilio himself, who was dreaming of the impossible encounter between Darío and Huidobro.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 621-24 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:50 PM It also has to be said that, deep down, they remained somewhat skeptical. I mean I was the source of the legend; they heard it from my mouth, from my lips hidden by the back of my hand, so although everything I had said about him while he was shut up in his apartment was essentially true, the story wasn't altogether credible, simply because of its source; that is, me.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 635-36 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:53 PM after making the sale, had smiled her most enigmatic smile (though the word enigmatic cannot even adumbrate that abyss of darkness)

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 649-50 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:55 PM there comes a time in the life of every gay man in Mexico when he goes and makes an irredeemably dumb-ass mistake,

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 661-62 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:56 PM I couldn't see Arturo's reaction but I guessed that the slightly vacant expression on his * * face until then was subtly unsettled by a small, almost imperceptible wrinkle, in which all the world's fear was concentrated.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 663 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:57 PM there is no such place for us.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 679 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:59 PM i guess this tory is pretty important. super important even.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 676-79 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 10:59 PM Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren't stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn't feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 686-88 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 11:01 PM a damned river, a river of the damned, ferrying corpses and corpses-to-be, black automobiles that appeared, vanished, and then reappeared, the same ones or their silent, demented echoes, as if the river of Hell were circular, which, now I come to think of it, is probably the case.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 695-98 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 11:03 PM I had the impression that, at the last minute,, Ernesto wanted to turn around and get out of there as fast as possible, while Arturito was resolved to continue, having entirely assumed the role of hard man, which was partly my creation, and which, in the course of that helpless, airless night, he had accepted like a wafer of bitter flesh, the host that no one can be qualified to swallow.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 700 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 11:05 PM research this event

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 707-8 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 11:06 PM a corridor bathed in sickly light, redolent of disinfectant and absolutely unadorned, as if its nakedness dated back to the first days of creation.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 736-37 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 11:10 PM The strange thing, though, was that they said all this without moving their lips and without any sound coming out of their mouths.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 776-79 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 11:15 PM and for * * a moment it seemed to me that the back of the room was sailing away from the rest of the building, with the bed as its taut sail, pulling away from the Clover Hotel, gliding off over a lake that was sailing in turn through a clear, clear sky, a sky from one of Dr. Atl's paintings of the valley of Mexico. The vision was so clear, all it needed was for Arturo and me to stand up and wave goodbye.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 786 | Added on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 11:16 PM what is the story? we shall never know

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 789-91 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 06:57 PM I remember Ernesto San Epifanio and Arturo Belano laughing in the taxi, laughing their way back to reality or what they liked to think of as reality, and I remember the air as we stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and then inside the taxi,

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 795-800 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 06:59 PM And that was how we entered and left the kingdom of the King of the Rent Boys, an enclave in the wasteland of Colonia Guerrero, Ernesto San Epifanio, aged twenty or nineteen, a homosexual poet born in Mexico (and one of the two best poets of his generation, the other being Ulises Lima, who we didn't know at that stage), Arturo Belano, aged twenty, a heterosexual poet born in Chile, Juan de Dios Montes (also known as Juan de Dos Montes and Juan Dedos), aged eighteen, apprenticed to a baker in Colonia Buenavista, apparently bisexual, and myself, Auxilio Lacouture, of definitively indefinite age, reader and mother, born in Uruguay or the Eastern Republic, if you prefer, and witness to the intricate conduits of dryness.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 808-11 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:01 PM I had known the adventures of poetry, which are always matters of life and death, but when I came back to the streets of Mexico, I was content with everyday life. Why ask for more? Why go on fooling myself? The everyday is like a frozen transparency that lasts only a few seconds. So I came back and saw it and let it envelop me. I am the mother, I told it, and honestly I don't think I'm cut out for horror movies.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 808-12 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:01 PM After that I came back to the world. I've had it with adventures, I said in a tiny little voice. Adventures, adventures. I had known the adventures of poetry, which are always matters of life and death, but when I came back to the streets of Mexico, I was content with everyday life. Why ask for more? Why go on fooling myself? The everyday is like a frozen transparency that lasts only a few seconds. So I came back and saw it and let it envelop me. I am the mother, I told it, and honestly I don't think I'm cut out for horror movies. Then the everyday began to * * expand like a soap bubble gone crazy, and popped.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 822-23 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:05 PM I rush headlong through the streets of Mexico City, which flash past, changing as I approach her house (each change building on the one that went before, each a sequel and a reproach),

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 822-24 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:05 PM I rush headlong through the streets of Mexico City, which flash past, changing as I approach her house (each change building on the one that went before, each a sequel and a reproach), until I reach a street where all the houses seem to be ruined castles,

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 835-43 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:09 PM And Remedios Varo, who is standing with her back to a picture, a picture covered with an old skirt (but that old skirt, it occurs to me, must have belonged to a giant), says that she has given up smoking, that her lungs are delicate now, and although she doesn't look like she has bad lungs, or has even seen anything bad in her life, I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow * * or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting against the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject), I know that she has seen things that very few women know they have seen, and now she is seeing her own death, which is set to occur in less than twelve months' time, and I know that there is someone else in her house who smokes and does not want to be discovered by me, which makes me think that whoever it is, it must be someone I know.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 835-44 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:09 PM And Remedios Varo, who is standing with her back to a picture, a picture covered with an old skirt (but that old skirt, it occurs to me, must have belonged to a giant), says that she has given up smoking, that her lungs are delicate now, and although she doesn't look like she has bad lungs, or has even seen anything bad in her life, I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow * * or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting against the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject), I know that she has seen things that very few women know they have seen, and now she is seeing her own death, which is set to occur in less than twelve months' time, and I know that there is someone else in her house who smokes and does not want to be discovered by me, which makes me think that whoever it is, it must be someone I know. Then I sigh and look at the reflection of the waning moon in the tiles of the fourth-floor women's bathroom, and, overcoming weariness and fear, I raise my hand, point at the picture behind the giant skirt, and ask her, What is it?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 846 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:11 PM It's the last one, she says. Or maybe she says, It's the second-to-last one.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 841 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:12 PM cosmic war

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 842 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:13 PM death fate

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 843 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:13 PM fragmentation of time. cubistic

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 837 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:16 PM where? when? everywhere? if so, what event during herlifetime was this? or is the devl ascending slowly forever, as with the ants?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 841 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:21 PM cosmic war... at play in latin america? relation to the devil? the devil seems to be truly evil for bolano... a being of horror. a manifestation of ultimate evil? what is the kingdom of order? something related to why latin america is going to shit?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 849 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:23 PM lol... so some sexual character? but also anxiety and cold horror... death and madness.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 856 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:23 PM you shall see what you must, Auxilio, but all in good time.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 858-59 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:24 PM we start talking about other things, aspects of daily life, although words from a different kind of context find their way into our conversation, like parousia or hierophant, like psychotropic drugs and elec-troshock therapy.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 872-74 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 07:27 PM she puts on a record and says, It's the Concertino in A minor by Salvador Bacarisse, and, listening to that Spanish music for the first time, I begin to cry, again, while the moon jumps from one tile to another in slow motion, as if I and not nature were directing this film.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 914-16 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:07 AM Then a chill ran down my spine. And the chill said to me: Hey, Auxilio (with an Uruguayan, not a Mexican, accent), the woman you're following, the woman who slipped out of Remedios Varos house, she's the real mother of Mexican poetry, not you; this woman whose footsteps you are following, she's the mother, not you, not you, not you.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 901 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 11:55 AM one of the few characters described physically

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 914 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 11:57 AM except it didnt really happen, did it? possibly essential.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 943-46 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:03 PM As if splitting my time between the deleterious Avenida Bucareli and the university made me any better. As if knowing and associating with young poets as well as old, failed journalists made me any better. The truth is, I'm no better. The truth is, young poets usually end up as old, failed journalists. And the university, my beloved university is lurking in the sewers underneath the Avenida * * Bucareli, waiting for its day to come.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 952 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:04 PM perhaps not coincidenta considering 'mother of poetry' bit.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 959-60 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:05 PM One night I challenged Lilian, saying, These kids have a right to know exactly what Che was like in bed. One of my crazier declarations, but I went ahead and made it anyway.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 963-65 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:08 PM That's what she was like, the woman I followed * * from the dream of Remedios Varo, the great Catalan painter, to the dream of Mexico City's incurable streets, where something was always happening, while seeming to whisper or shout or hiss at you: Nothing ever happens here.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 985-91 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:14 PM And that is when time stands still again, a worn-out image if ever there was one, because either time never stands still or it has always been standing still; so let's say instead that a tremor disturbs the continuum of time, or that time plants its big feet wide apart, bends down, puts its head between its legs, looking at me upside down, one eye winking crazily just a few inches below its ass, or let's say that the full or waxing or obscurely waning moon of Mexico City slides again over the tiles of the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, or that the silence of a wake falls over the Café Quito and * * all I can hear are the murmurs of Lilian Serpas's ghostly court and once again I don't know if I'm in 1968 or 1974 or 1980, or gliding, finally, like the shadow of a sunken ship, toward the blessed year 2000, which I shall not live to see.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1003-6 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:17 PM She says, I can't go home tonight. She says, You have to go and tell Carlos I'll be back early tomorrow morning. And my first impulse is to refuse point blank. But then Lilian looks me in the face and smiles at me (she doesn't cover her mouth when she speaks, like me, or when she smiles, although she should) and I am at a loss for words because I am looking at the mother of Mexican poetry, the worst mother Mexican poetry could possibly have, but its one, true mother none the less.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1009-10 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:17 PM the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city's calm, an obeisant calm whose sole property is that of being a mirage.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1050-52 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 12:36 PM But I don't turn up my nose at poverty. In Latin America no one is ashamed of being poor (except perhaps some Chileans). There was, however, something abysmal about this poverty: entering Lilian's apartment was like plunging into the depths of an Atlantic trench.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1098-1100 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:08 PM Electra and Orestes, the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, decide to avenge their father and regain control of the kingdom. This involves killing Aegisthus and their own mother. Horror.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1105-7 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:09 PM The sacrifice of a hundred or five hundred oxen: you would have been able to smell the stench of blood for miles around. Imagine so much death, all around you; it must have been stupefying.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1120-21 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:13 PM He wakes up at first light the next day and goes to the window: the lunar landscape of Argos confirms his suspicion. He has fallen in love with Erigone.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1120-23 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:13 PM He wakes up at first light the next day and goes to the window: the lunar landscape of Argos confirms his suspicion. He has fallen in love with Erigone. But someone who has killed his mother is incapable of love, said Coffeen looking me in the eye with a charred smile, and Orestes knows that Erigone is poison to him, as well as being a blood relative of Aegisthus, which is sufficient justification for leading her to slaughter.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1134-39 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:15 PM Seized by fear, she says that she would prefer to stay in the city, close to him. Orestes loses his patience. If you stay here, I will kill you, he says. The gods have driven me crazy. Once again, he speaks of his crime; he speaks of the Erinnyes and the life he wants to lead when he can sort things out in his head or even before he gets them sorted out: wandering through Greece with his friend Pylades, becoming a legend. Hippies, * * with no ties to hold us, turning our lives into art. But Erigone doesn't understand Orestes's words, and fears that all this is part of a plan hatched by the cerebral Electra, a kind of euthanasia, an exit into darkness that will not stain the young king's hands with blood.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1142-44 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:16 PM after having been moved, that Orestes began to give serious thought to the idea of protecting Erigone from the dangers besetting her in devastated Argos, which consisted, fundamentally, of his own madness, his * * homicidal fury, his shame and repentance, that is, the components of what he liked to call the destiny of Orestes, a high-sounding name for self-destruction.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1141-44 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:16 PM Then he said that it was only from that moment on, that is, after having been moved, that Orestes began to give serious thought to the idea of protecting Erigone from the dangers besetting her in devastated Argos, which consisted, fundamentally, of his own madness, his * * homicidal fury, his shame and repentance, that is, the components of what he liked to call the destiny of Orestes, a high-sounding name for self-destruction.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 1156 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:18 PM dis

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1161-62 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:19 PM The problem was that I had gone on thinking about Erigone and suddenly I realized something about the story that had escaped my notice until then. Something, something, but what?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1146-50 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:23 PM From a tower, Orestes watched her walking away from the city. Then he shut his eyes and, when he opened them again, Erigone was nowhere to be seen. As he said this, Coffeen shut his eyes, and I saw the moon (full, waning, or waxing—what did it matter?) racing at a vertiginous pace to touch every tile in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature in the unscathed year 1968. And I thought, as I had thought before, as I am thinking now, What shall I do?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1164-68 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:27 PM I was wearing the expression of someone who is about to remember something, or has a name on the tip of her tongue, a thought beginning to géstate among electrical impulses and currents of blood, but remaining in the shadows, as it were, formless, frightened of itself or of the mechanism it has set in motion, or rather frightened of the effect that it will inevitably have on that mechanism, and yet unable to delay the connection or the revelation, as if by dint of repetition the name Erigone had become a kind of forceps dragging whatever it was from its lair, to an accompaniment of howls, involuntary giggles and sundry atrocities.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1176-77 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:28 PM seemed that Coffeen was Orestes and I was Erigone, which meant that the night would have no end, I would never see the light of day again, I would be incinerated by the black gaze of Lilian's son,

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1179-81 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:30 PM Coffeen opened his eyes, eyes that had seen Erigone disappear in the vastness of time, and looked at me with a gaze that was blank for a moment or perplexed, the sort of gaze that settles on a perfect stranger or a random configuration of shapes, but as he gradually recognized me, perplexity gave way to hatred, rancor, and homicidal fury.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1183-89 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:31 PM Coffeen was looking at me. I was looking at an airport devoid of planes and people, from whose shadowless hangars and runways only dreams and visions departed. It was the airport of the drunks and the drug addicts. But then it evaporated and in its place I saw Coffeen's eyes wanting to know what it was that I had remembered. And I said: Nothing. Nothing, just some crazy idea I had. I went to get up, because by then I really did feel it was time to go, but Coffeen put his hand on my shoulder and stopped me. Let God's will be done, I thought. I am not a religious woman, but that was what ran through my mind. And: I shall not see the light of a new day, which, * * put like that, sounds rather trite, but for me, at that moment, those words had the ring of a mysterious portal, or something. And, strange as it may seem, what I felt was not fear but relief, as if I had been anesthetized by suddenly realizing what I had overlooked in the story of Erigone,

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1183-85 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:32 PM Coffeen was looking at me. I was looking at an airport devoid of planes and people, from whose shadowless hangars and runways only dreams and visions departed. It was the airport of the drunks and the drug addicts. But then it evaporated and in its place I saw Coffeen's eyes wanting to know what it was that I had remembered.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1185-90 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:32 PM And I said: Nothing. Nothing, just some crazy idea I had. I went to get up, because by then I really did feel it was time to go, but Coffeen put his hand on my shoulder and stopped me. Let God's will be done, I thought. I am not a religious woman, but that was what ran through my mind. And: I shall not see the light of a new day, which, * * put like that, sounds rather trite, but for me, at that moment, those words had the ring of a mysterious portal, or something. And, strange as it may seem, what I felt was not fear but relief, as if I had been anesthetized by suddenly realizing what I had overlooked in the story of Erigone, and although there was nothing clinical, to say the least, about the living room of Lilian Serpas's apartment, I felt as though I was being wheeled into an operating room.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1202-4 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:35 PM And the doctors replied with the patter they use on the dying: The birth of History can't wait, and if we arrive late you won't see anything, only ruins and smoke, an empty landscape, and you'll be alone again forever even if you go out and get drunk with your poet friends every night.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1216-17 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:40 PM I hailed a taxi on Bolivar. As it was taking me to my rooftop room, which at the time was in Colonia Escanden, I started crying.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 1228 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:42 PM some kinda rape wish horror or something more serious

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1237-42 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:44 PM At night the guardian angel of my dreams would come to me and say: Hey, Auxilio, so now you know where they ended up, the kids of Latin America. Shut up, I replied. Shut up. I don't know anything. What do you mean, the kids? I don't know anything at all. Then the voice made a murmuring sound; it said, Mmm, or something like that, as if it found my answer unconvincing. And I said: I'm still in the women's bathroom in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, and the moon is melting the tiles on the wall one by one, opening a hole for images to flow through, films about us and the books we read, and the future moving at the speed of light, which we shall not see.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1245-47 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:45 PM I am in the women's bathroom in the faculty building and I can see the future, I said, in a soprano voice, as if I were being coy. I know that, said the dream voice, I know that.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 1249 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:46 PM idiotic prophecies made in the womens bathroom or years later or both...

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1255-56 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:47 PM Metempsychosis. Poetry shall not disappear. Its non-power shall manifest itself in a different form.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1263-64 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:48 PM Who shall read Jean-Pierre Duprey in the year 2059? Who shall read Gary Snyder? Who shall read Ilarie Voronca? These are the questions I ask myself. Who shall read Gilberte Dallas? Who shall read Rodolfo Wilcock? Who shall read Alexandre Unik?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 1278 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:50 PM check it?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1294-95 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:52 PM Who am I supposed to eat? I said, looking for her shadow, which sounded as sweet and emphatic as Ruben Darío's "Marcha Triunfal."

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1297-99 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:53 PM Then the little voice began to talk about the end of a novel by Julio Cortázar, the one where a character is dreaming that he's in a movie theater and someone comes along and tells him to wake up. And she started talking about Marcel Schwob and Jerzy Andrzejewski and Pitol's translation of Andrzejewski's novel,

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 1331 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:59 PM the moon moves strangely.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1331-33 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 02:59 PM That was when I decided to come down from the mountains. I decided not to starve to death in the women's bathroom. I decided not to go crazy. I decided not to become a beggar. I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at. I began my descent.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 1354 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:04 PM oh are you now?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1355-56 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:04 PM I stayed there on my own in the Faculty, shut up in a bathroom, with no food, for more than ten days, for more than fifteen days, from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of September, I think, I'm not sure any more.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Note Loc. 1356 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:05 PM cant forget anything, right?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1372-73 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:06 PM I dreamed of Juana de Ibarbourou and her book La rosa de los vientos (The Compass Rose), published in 1930, and her first book too, Las lenguas de diamante (Diamond Tongues), such a pretty title, exquisite,

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1383-87 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:09 PM How poetic, to destroy my writings like that. I thought, It would have been better to swallow them, now I'm finished. I thought, The vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought, Because I wrote, I endured. I thought, Because I destroyed what I had written, they will find me, they will hit me, they will rape me, they will kill me. I thought, The two things are connected, writing and destroying, hiding and being found. Then I sat down on the throne and shut my eyes. I fell asleep. Then I woke up again.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1401-3 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:10 PM they would look at me (but who were they?) and say: Auxilio, you're the mother of Mexican poetry. And I would say (or shout, if I was drunk), No, I'm nobody's mother, but I did know them all, all the young poets, whether they were natives of Mexico City, or came from the provinces, or other parts of Latin America and washed up here, and I loved them all.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1423-25 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:16 PM When I reached the tree, the birds had flown away. Then I saw that at its far end, to the west, * * the valley opened into a bottomless abyss. Am I going crazy? I wondered. Is this the madness and the fear of Arthur Gordon Pym? Or am I recovering my sanity so quickly it's making me dizzy?

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1423-26 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:16 PM When I reached the tree, the birds had flown away. Then I saw that at its far end, to the west, * * the valley opened into a bottomless abyss. Am I going crazy? I wondered. Is this the madness and the fear of Arthur Gordon Pym? Or am I recovering my sanity so quickly it's making me dizzy? The words exploded in my head, as if a giant were shouting inside me, but outside the silence was total.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1434-35 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:19 PM They were walking toward the abyss. I think I realized that as soon as I saw them. A shadow or a mass of children, walking unstoppably toward the abyss.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1438-40 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:19 PM My mind endeavored to remember a text about children intoning canticles as they marched to war. But it was no use. My mind was inside out. The journey through the snow had turned me into skin. Perhaps that is how I had always been. Intelligence has never been my strength.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1444-47 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:20 PM And I heard them sing. I hear them singing still, faintly, even now that I am no longer in the valley, a barely audible murmur, the prettiest children of Latin America, the ill-fed and the well-fed children, those who had everything and those who had nothing, such a beautiful song it is, issuing from their lips, and how beautiful they were, such beauty, although they were marching deathward, shoulder to shoulder.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1457-58 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:23 PM And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure. And that song is our amulet.

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Amulet - Roberto Bolano (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com)

- Highlight Loc. 1451-57 | Added on Saturday, November 03, 2012, 03:23 PM So the ghost-children marched down the valley and fell into the abyss. Their passage was brief. And their ghost-song or its echo, which is almost to say the echo of nothingness, went on marching, I could hear it marching on at the same pace, the pace of courage and generosity. A barely audible song, a song of war and love, because although the children were clearly marching to war, the way they marched recalled the superb, theatrical attitudes of love. But what kind of love could they have known, I wondered when they were gone from the valley, leaving only their song resonating in my ears. The love of their parents, the love of their dogs and cats, the love of their toys, but above all the love, the desire and the pleasure they shared with one another.