Book Review: A Masterpiece of Uprootedness
The Book of Embraces, Images, and Text by Eduardo Galeano; translated by Cedric Belfrage with Mark Schafer
Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
Paperback, 272 pages
ISBN: 0393308553
Eduardo Galeano is one of the most popular writers in Latin America. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1940. He started his work as a political cartoonist and a journalist. He then turned to writing about “nobodies” (marginalized and oppressed people). Since 1967, he has published more than twenty books; over half of them are translated into English. Galeano’s most popular books include 1971’s The Open Veins of Latin America, Days and Nights of Love and War (winner of 1987 Casa de las Americas Prize), Soccer in Sun and Shadow, We Say No, Walking Words, and a trilogy, Memory of Fire, that got the American Book Award in 1989. He continues writing articles in Spanish journals. His most recent book, Upside Down, has been described as an agitating, propagandist, electric, and alarming work.
The book of Embraces is an anthology of around 190 bits and pieces ranging from one line to at most one page. The texts are accompanied by Galeano’s own fanciful, abstract, and surrealistic illustrations. The book takes the reader on a long exploratory journey to the width and depth of life, its wonders, and its stupidity. In a very short and telegraphic form, Galeano speaks about many things: his personal experiences, dreams of his wife (Helena), theology, arts, media, bureaucracy, myths, folklores, poetry, war, tyranny, torture, love, beauty, sex, identity, alienation, vices, human faculty, steadfastness, etc. The book is reminiscent of the famous dictum of a great philosopher: “Nothing human is alien to me.”
The Book of Embraces speaks from its readers’ hearts. You feel some pieces as if they had happened to you or the closest of your kin. The Book of Embraces “is a mosaic.” Its apparent fragmentation does not disturb its integrity. While the truth speaks in a variety of voices, and sometimes in a contradictory manner, all pieces are connected as a coherent whole.
Although the book’s focus is on Latin America (Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, etc), the author does not, however, recognize any geographical frontier. He takes his readers to Spain, Italy, Algeria, England, France and other corners of the globe.
The Book of Embraces could, among other things, be considered as a literature of uprootedness. The bitterness and achievements of uprootedness are both reflected in this great magnum opus. Based on the personal experiences, Eduardo Galeano speaks about poverty and deprivation with the strongest satirical langue. “I write for those who cannot read me: the downtrodden,” he says. He belongs to those brave Latin American and the world’s writers who are using their talents to address the root causes of people’s uprootedness. He has spared no time to defy repressive Latin American regimes.
In 1973, as a result of a military coup in his country, Galeano was forced to exile, initially in Argentina, then in Spain. He returned to Uruguay in 1985. In almost all his writings, specifically in The Book of Embraces, he reflects his experience of uprootedness. He speaks about his nostalgia and shares nostalgia of others. He says, “I’m a curious man, always devouring other people, their voices, their secrets, their stories, their colours. I’m stealing their words; maybe I should be arrested.” John Leonard, literary critique of the New York Review Book, calls him “a dangerous radical storyteller.
Following are some samples from this Galeano’s masterpiece:
Nobodies
“We are not, could be
We don’t speak languages, but dialects.
We don’t have religions, but superstitions
We don’t create art, but handicrafts
We don’t have a culture, but folklore
We are not human being, but human resources
We do not have faces, but arms
We do not have names, but numbers
We do not appear in the history of the world,
But in the police blotter of the local paper
The nobodies, who are not worth
The bullets that kill them.”
Dreams at the End of Exile
- “Helena dreamed she was trying to close her suitcase and couldn’t, and she pushed down on it with both hands and knelt on it and sat on top of it and stood on top of it, and it wouldn’t budge. Mysteries and belongings gushed from the suitcase that wouldn’t close.”\
- “Helena was returning to Buenos Aires, but didn’t know what language to speak or what currency to use. Standing on the corner of Pueyrredon and Las Heras, she waited for the number 60, which didn’t arrive – which never would arrive.”
- “Her glasses were smashed and her keys were missing. She scoured the city for her keys, groping on hands and knees, and when at last she found them, the keys told her that they didn’t open any doors.”
In conclusion, I would like to depict The Book of Embraces as a liberal, leftist, anti-capitalistic, and a secular humanistic gospel. The author should be commended for his unshakeable faith in the ultimate triumph of human voice: “When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice.”
Ezat Mossallanejad