Amulet
By Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Chris Andrews
Picador £14.99, 184 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

Chilean Roberto Bolaño has become the posthumous poster boy of Latin American fiction since his epic 2666 was translated into English last year. Sharing many of that novel’s characters, Amulet is as compact as its predecessor was expansive.

Mexico City, 1968. As the army invades the university campus, Auxilio Lacouture hides in the women’s toilets. Casting her mind into the past, the self-anointed “mother of Mexican poetry” recalls her life as a hanger-on to the city’s Bohemian poets.

One of Bolaño’s subjects is the power (or powerlessness) of art in the face of political violence. Indeed, ambivalence about the machismo of Latin American writers pervades the book. Drifting through bars and cafés like a ghost, the gap-toothed Auxilio is a brilliant creation, a mixture of hopefulness, insecurity and defiance. Only the fragmented and hallucinatory final pages disappoint.