(Considering the neoconservative slant of the book review section, this is a remarkably positive review.)
NY Times Book Review, August 23, 2009 A History of Us By NEIL GORDON MIRRORS Stories of Almost Everyone By Eduardo Galeano Translated by Mark Fried Illustrated. 391 pp. Nation Books. $26.95 Leftist political outrage is a tricky mode for storytellers, lending itself to platitudes and the verities of liberal self-righteousness. That’s why so many political novels turn to the techniques of suspense, and why so many fail. And then there’s Eduardo Galeano, the lifelong political and literary activist recently brought to the American public eye when Hugo Chávez gave President Obama a copy of “Open Veins of Latin America,” Galeano’s seminal history of, as his subtitle has it, “Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.” His political stance is one of consistent moral horror and his idiom the plain and sometimes primitivist voice of his native Uruguay, captured neatly in the memoir “Days and Nights of Love and War” in his description of an early political insight: “When I learned this, I had long since lost my innocence, but I felt like a cheated little boy.” The literary form Galeano has created in his many books is unique: little narratives and descriptive vignettes — here elegantly translated by Mark Fried — that might range from a paragraph to a dozen pages and that progress with a powerful hypnotic rhythm. Each is self-contained and neatly tells its story not only by what it says, but, equally powerfully, by what it leaves out — and by its juxtaposition, or syncopation, with its neighbors. Galeano’s latest book, “Mirrors,” uses this technique to create nothing less than a capsule history of the human race. In some 600 short entries, he travels from prehistory to the present, from the impressionistic to the brutally, precisely documented. Each entry is an avatar of outrage over the depredations of power against its multifarious victims, those rendered helpless by poverty, religion, race, sexual identity or — as in the vignettes about Galileo and Isaac Babel — the simple accident of being right when the truth defined by the prevailing authority was wrong. The first dozen or so stories move us from the origin of humanity in desire (“Life was alone, no name, no memory. It had hands, but no one to touch. It had a tongue, but no one to talk to. Life was one, and one was none. . . . The arrow of desire split life down the middle, and life was two”) to a meditation on the likelihood that Adam and Eve were black, an evocation of the mystery of the cave paintings in the Sahara, an explanation of the origin of Indian castes and a tribute to the Rosetta stone. Greek mythology figures centrally in the book, as do the flowering of Moorish civilization in Spain, the Crusades and the Inquisition. AT times the entries are simply testimonial: “In a single night in August 1944, 2,897 Gypsies, women, children, men, perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.” Elsewhere they are poetic. And sometimes they can be uncomfortably polemical: a brief history of the Holocaust (a “colossal butchery organized by Hitler”) concludes that “hunting Jews has always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.” Is the elision of the complex victimization of the Palestinians by Arab states a necessary consequence of this lapidary form? Galeano’s prose is nearly lulling in its lyricism, a quality that gives it an overridingly shamanic tone. His powerful voice reminds us, over and over again, of the responsibility of writers to be constantly in search of new forms of expression that may draw us out of our complacency, as he does so eloquently here. As in his previous books, he succeeds in capturing the bottomless horror of the state’s capacity to inflict pain on the individual, offering as effective an act of political dissent as exists anywhere in contemporary literature. Neil Gordon is a novelist and the dean of Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Arts. ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
