A tour de force, "Amulet" is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. It is September 1968 and the Mexican student movement is about to run head-on into the repressive right-wing government of Mexico: hundreds of young people will soon die. When the army invades the university, one woman hides in a fourth-floor ladies' room and for twelve days she is the only person left on campus. Staring at the floor, she recounts her bohemian life among the young poets of Mexico City--inventing and reinventing freely--and along the way she creates a cosmology of literature. She is Auxilio Lacouture, the Mother of Mexican Poetry. Auxilio speaks of her passionate attachment to young poets as well as to two beloved aged poets, to a woman who once slept with Che Guevera, and to the painter Remedios Varo, recalling visits which never occured. And as they grow ever more hallucinatory, her "memories" become mythologies before completely transforming into riveting dark prophecies. Hair-raising and enthralling, Amuletis a heart-breaking novel and another brilliant example of the art of Roberto Bolano, "the most admired novelist," as Susan Sontag noted, "in the Spanish-speaking world."

罗贝托•波拉尼奥（Roberto Bolaño,1953—2003）出生于智利，父亲是卡车司机和业余拳击手，母亲在学校教授数学和统计学。1968年全家移居墨西哥。1973年波拉尼奥再次回到智利投身社会主义革命却遭到逮捕，差点被杀害。逃回墨西哥后他和好友推动了融合超现实主义、达达主义以及街头剧场的“现实以下主义”（Infrarealism）运动，意图激发拉丁美洲年轻人对生活与文学的热爱。1977 年他前往欧洲，最后在西班牙波拉瓦海岸结婚定居。2003 年因为肝脏功能损坏，等不到器官移植而在巴塞罗那去世，年仅五十岁。

波拉尼奥四十岁才开始写小说，作品数量却十分惊人，身后留下十部小说、四部短篇小说集以及三部诗集。1998 年出版的《荒野侦探》在拉美文坛引起的轰动，不亚于三十年前《百年孤独》出版时的盛况。而其身后出版的《2666》更是引发欧美舆论压倒性好评，均致以杰作、伟大、里程碑、天才等等赞誉。苏珊•桑塔格、约翰•班维尔、科尔姆•托宾、斯蒂芬•金等众多作家对波拉尼奥赞赏有加，更有评论认为此书的出版自此将作者带至塞万提斯、斯特恩、梅尔维尔、普鲁斯特、穆齐尔与品钦的同一队列。