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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today’s teaser is from the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano, and comes from his short novel ‘Amulet’, page 43.

Amulet

“But one thing stopped me from going crazy: I never lost my sense of humour.
I could laught at my skirts, my stovepipe trousers, my stripy tights, my white socks, my page-boy hair going whiter by the day, my eyes scanning the nights of Mexico City, my pink ears attuned to all the university gossip: the rises and falls, who got put down, who got passed over, who was sucking up to whom, the stars of the day, the inflated reputations, rickety beds that were taken apart and reassembled under the convulsive sky of the Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that restless, unattainable sky, like an Aztec cooking pot, under which I came and went, just happy to be alive, with all the poets of Mexico City and Arturito Belano, who was seventeen years old, then eighteen, I could practically see him growing.”

As befits an artist, Bolano became renowned with his posthumous work ‘2666’ that was finished just before his death in 2003. Shortly after, he was declared a ‘literary phenomenon’. Like most South American authors, his style veers towards elements of magical realism and has a haunting quality that plays with notions of time and space.