"Through my writing," Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano writes in The Book of Embraces, "I try to express the magical reality, which I find at the core of the hideous reality of America." This writing he calls "Magical Marxism: one half reason, one half passion, and a third half mystery," and it's that mysterious third half that defines The Book of Embraces: a sense that life, especially in the Global South, is more full than it seems. Sometimes this superfluence of life is painful ("hideous reality") and sometimes luminous ("passion," "mystery"), but it is revealed through the voices of those most marginalized by dictators and plutocrats: martyred writers, the poor, the graffiti that appears on city walls.
The Book of Embraces takes the form of a series of vignettes, each no longer than a page, and often only a few short lines. In the compacted space of these vignettes all sorts of genres collide: journalism, history, autobiography, magical realism, anecdote. The first few vignettes suggest jokes, or maybe Aesop's fables, with their clever turns and fantastical air:
On his deathbed, a man of the vineyards spoke into Marcela's ear. Before dying, he revealed his secret:
"The grape," he whispered, "is made of wine."
Marcela Perez-Silva told me this, and I thought: If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are.
Characters troop in and out, performing singular rituals: a poor Cuban becomes a photographer in New York, where he takes a prize-winning photo of a murder where he "managed to photograph death." A visitor to Pablo Neruda's house witnesses a vision of an eagle flapping its wings. A woman named Helena "travels in a horse-drawn carriage to the land where dreams are dreamed." A man is befriended by a catfish. Some of these characters are quite famous: Neruda, Alistair Reid, Ernesto Cardenal. Some are the named or nameless poor: carpenters, beggars, shoe-shiners. "Helena" is Galeano's wife, and Galeano himself, after a while, becomes a character, skipping from city to city in his capacity as a writer and speaker, which gives The Book of Embraces a distinctly global flair.
Still, the book is really about Latin America. As it progresses, the lightheartedness of the magical realism drops away and the vignettes become more sober, turning to martyred journalists and political upheaval. The sanguine themes of freedom and expression become captivity and compression. Sometimes, the vignettes are much worse for it, when Galeano turns from the preciousness of fables to cheap sloganeering: "Politicians speak but say nothing. Voters vote but don't elect. The information media disinform. Schools teach ignorance. Judges punish the victims." But when the vignettes are strong, they make a powerful critique of the bloodiness of Latin American regimes, where, as in this description of Colombia, "rivers of blood merge with rivers of gold. Glories of the economy, years of cheap money: in the midst of euphoria, the country produces cocaine, coffee, and crime in insane quantities." Galeano argues that "Democracy is a northern luxury" while "In the southern half of the world, so the system teaches, violence and hunger belong not to history but to nature, and justice and liberty have been condemned to mutual hatred."
The Book of Embraces is a real bag of spare parts, and that's its strength as well as its flaw. It's a challenge to read straight through; better to read it perhaps one piece a day, like a Christian devotional. But when the vignettes are good, they speak with considerable power. They have numbered titles ("Hunger 1," "Art and Reality 3") that link them to prior pieces, and in this way make a kind of threaded pattern that binds the whole thing together into something valuable.
I've never read a book from Uruguay before, so this makes #53 in my project to read a book from every country.
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