peter young’s listopia

33) Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, 1999
Picador picked up a total of eleven Bolaño titles last year, and this was the first to hit the shelves after publication of his posthumous magnum opus 2666. There is a link between the two books: the year 2666 gets a mention here, included among the many other ramblings of Bolaño's wonderful creation Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan immigrant and the self-declared 'mother of Mexican poetry'. She's holed up in a Mexico City university washroom, hiding from the military as they try to quell student demonstrations in 1968; her rather prolonged stay there results in an increasingly hallucinatory excursion backwards and forwards in time as she recalls meeting people she could never have met, plus some far-flung predictions of which authors will be popular in, say, 2059 or 2017 – there's a surprise in store here for SF fans as Bolaño indulges a penchant for name-dropping outside his own genre (and I can feel the germ of a future article taking root here on Bolaño's science fictional referencing). He also gives himself plenty of space to let his words breathe with his familiar long rambling sentences, and it's often difficult to see where fact separates from fiction or where he is taking the story until the very last page, although the thrill, as with By Night in Chile, is in Auxilio's mad journey itself. Simply, a lovely book.

75) William S. Burroughs, Junky, 1953
For the proper experience this is one of those books that really ought to be read as a first edition, with its cheap cover illustration that was meant to inspire a degree of horror towards heroin use in those who picked it up. Starting life as one half of an Ace Original double paperback, with fifty years hindsight it's easy to see how Junky took the road from cheap pulp fiction to cult novel, and while Burroughs didn't intentionally romanticise heroin use, today, like heroin itself, this kind of book or film is now mainstream. Under the thin disguise of 'William Lee' Burroughs is unapologetically confessional, yet Junky probably wouldn't have made publication at all if he didn't also display the redemptive element of repeatedly trying to kick his heroin habit (and instead fall back on the lesser social evils of morphine, coke, alcohol and petty crime), first in New York, later in New Orleans then Mexico City. Junky isn't an alienating experience because Burroughs does not take you on that journey; instead his alienation arrived here fully formed with the everyday world already rendered meaningless – including his wife (who he killed between drafts of this book) and, for the most part, the law – and in replacement his junk habit was promoted to the almost everyday activity of a natural bodily function like sex, a mere extension of himself stripped of its negative and antisocial connotations. Burroughs's writing is for the most part deadpan and functional yet he occasionally indulges in wonderfully descriptive and concise analyses of what's going on beneath the skin – not his own skin or his own experiences while under, but the skins of those exterior horrors, other people, and these passages were an early root from which were later to come the excesses of Naked Lunch. This is a relatively safe book now, but it's lost none of its immediacy.

  El Gusano, Mexico, a living ghost town   [ JAKE PRICE ]

  Getting an education in Sierra Leone   [ WARREN SWORDS ]

  Exploring contemporary Japan   [ HIROJI KUBOTA ]

Jennifer Clement, A True Story Based on Lies, 2001
This book is not as difficult to pin down as its title suggests, so simple is its structure of dual narratives and yet so beguiling and engrossing is the nature of the poetic language Clement uses. A True Story Based on Lies explores the consequences of a brief sexual relationship between Leonora, a fifteen year-old native servant in a wealthy modern household in Mexico City, and Mr. O'Conner, her master. But when a child is born from this union she is raised as an adopted daughter of the house, while Leonora is expected to abandon any hope of true motherhood and merely remain the servant to the manipulations of Mrs. O'Conner, all pointing to one, possibly inevitable and tragic, conclusion.

Leonora is an innocent victim of adult games several times over, but this is not a mysogynist piece of fiction, indeed all the women of the house maintain this deception not only for the sake of their masters' saving face, but because the alternative is Leonora returning to poverty and her child begging on the streets. The narratives contain plenty of native Indian 'knowledge' and other quirky strangeness, plus the right amount of pathos that imbues the Mexican servants of the house with as much dignity as innocence. Further, it describes a situation that must be common the whole world over, not just to Latin America. Certainly one of the best – and in the story's very clever and economical telling, most original – books I've read this year.