Roberto Bolano's Amulet embodies in one woman's breathtaking voice the melancholy and violent history of Latin America. Amulet begins: "This is going to be a horror story." The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture: the "Mother of Mexican Poetry." Tall, thin, and blonde, she becomes famous as the sole person who resists the army's 1968 invasion of the university--she hides in a ladies' room for twelve days. As she waits the occupiers out, famished, Auxilio recalls her life, her lost teeth, her beloved friends and poets, but she is soon in strange landscapes: in ice-bound mountains, in seedy bars in "the dark night of the soul of Mexico City," in a terrifying chasm, and in the bathroom where moonlight shines, moving slowly from tile to tile.