An amulet, an item of fakery and of beauty, may be worn by women of a certain age or by boys whose sense of destiny does not depend on the approval of grown men. The men in Roberto Bolaño’s “Amulet” (New Directions, 184 pages, $21.95) are authoritarian butchers; they stand outside Mr. Bolaño’s frame, but the unifying reference point of his dreamlike novel is the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968, when an estimated 200 to 300 student protesters were killed by the Mexican army.

Apparent immaturity, a capacity for fascination, and a penchant for aimless café life have flourished in Mr. Bolaño’s fiction, in the shade of terrible dictatorships. Disappearances have opened the way for fantastic theories: An ominous political climate has created a pan-South American lost generation, full of characters who will relish an ominous tone.

The lost boys of “Amulet,” viewed through the visionary eyes of narrator Auxilio Lacouture, their self-appointed mother, look heroic. The Rimbaud-like youth, elected by talent and vagrant by vocation, has been the cynosure of Mr. Bolaño’s fiction, at least as is evident in the three acclaimed volumes already translated by Chris Andrews. Auxilio sings the praises of this type as only a mother could:

. . . they gave me their poems to read, their verses, their fuddled translations, and I took those sheets of foolscap and read them in silence, with my back to the table where they were raising their glasses desperately trying to be ingenious or ironic or cynical, poor angels . . . “

Auxilio speaks Mr. Bolaño’s rolling sentences in a memorial voice, like a Cassandra who has seen too much. Her accursed vision alights on her when the Mexican army takes over the university: Auxilio, sitting in a bathroom stall, goes unnoticed, and stays, without food or company, for more than 15 days. The delirium of cold tile becomes her “gigantic rainy day,” her “Duino Palace,” her “timeship,” from which she can remember the future “prospectively.”

The glittering fiber of Mr. Bolaño’s fiction is bound up with such trauma: His achievement lies not in a triumph of taste or a triumph of effort but in the originality of his confidence. Auxilio gets several fantastical speeches on the doom of South America and its fugitive literature. She sees “the dust of the world,” the particulates of lost books, descending on Mexico City, where it will obscure all existing books. In that same city, she reflects that the Avenida Guerrero “is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666.” In one vision of a prehistoric landform on the site of Mexico City, she sees herself: “I had an eagle’s eye view of my body moving through snowy passes, drifts and endless white esplanades like the back of a fossilized Moby Dick.”

Other Latin American writers have traversed this magical terrain, but this reader supposes that very few writers have ever telescoped between fantasy and history so surely, feeling a continental tremor, “with the tail end of that tremor still slithering through me,” as Auxilio says after her vision of dust. In Mr. Bolaño’s story “Sensini,” from “Last Evenings on Earth” (2006), he writes of “a world where vast geographical spaces could suddenly shrink to the dimensions of a coffin.” That metaphor could be his trademark.

Toward the final pages of “Amulet,” Auxilio offers a list of specific prophecies on the survival of literature:

Vladimir Mayakovsky shall come back into fashion around the year 2150 … For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033. Ezra Pound shall disappear from certain libraries in the year 2089 … Paul Celan shall rise from his ashes in the year 2113. Andre Breton shall return through mirrors in the year 2071.

These dates do not offer themselves up to be believed; they are not calibrated for that purpose. Instead, they mark out a view just lengthy enough to be sublime and then fill that view quickly, before the reader knows what has happened. To grasp this bookish fantasy of Mr. Bolaño, when, unlike him, most of us know nothing firsthand of political violence or literary suppression, can be difficult. Even to hypothesize that these dates are convincing as fiction gives me goose bumps.

blytal@nysun.com