Memory of Fire: Vol 1-Genesis (edition 1985)

Part 1 of the trilogy Memory of Fire

I don’t know to what literary form this voice of voices belongs. Memory of Fire is not an anthology, clearly not; but I don’t know if it is a novel or essay or epic poem or testament or chronicle or . . . Deciding robs me of no sleep. I do not believe in the frontiers that, according to literature’s customs officers, separate the forms.
I did not want to write an objective work—neither wanted to nor could. There is nothing neutral about this historical narration. Unable to distance myself, I take sides; I confess it and am not sorry. However, each fragment of this huge mosaic is based on a solid documentary foundation. What is told here has happened, although I tell it in my style and manner.

Forty pages of creation myths are followed by many short chapters from less than a page to a couple of pages in length, each headed by the date and place and describing one event and adding another piece to the jigsaw that is the history of the Americas. Sources are given for each chapter, and as well as books written by historians, Galeano has used lots of primary sources, written by people who were actually there. This gives the book a really immediate quality, full of the wonders of this new world, which may not have contained the expected cities made of gold, but did have strawberries and pineapples, rain forests, jaguars and turtles, and of course chocolate.

This volume, which covers the years 1492 to 1700 mostly covers Latin America and the Caribbean since they were the first to be colonised by Europeans, but there are some references to events in North America. Very few Spaniards come out of this book with any credit., but there are a few, Bartolomé de las Casas and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca among them.

I bought this book after seeing several rave reviews online, and found this unique book a marvellous introduction to the history of an area I didn't know much about. ( )

In the beginning of the third volume of this work the author himself states that he ignores to what genre the book belongs: narrative, essay, epic poetry, cronicle, testimony... maybe all of them, maybe none. Indeed, if one's objective is to pigeonhole this work, he or she is most likely at a loss, but if one is not worried at all about this type of classification activities and just wants to enjoy the fruition of a great work, this is an unqualified masterpiece. Without doubt, one of the most impressive, nay perfect, works of literature I ever read. The author embarks on a five centuries voyage through the history of America (mainly, but not exclusively, Latin America) in a work that not only conveys the history, but all the rest: the smells, the colours,and the sounds; the deserts, the islands, the mountains, the rivers, and the jungles; the lives, the main events sometimes at an amazing new perspective, the unknown and almost insignificant events shading a new light on the whole, the famous and the anonymous; the battles, the revolutions, the counter revolutions, the strikes, the day to day livin$ the football matches, the soap operas... Each chapter is something between a half and two pages; it is headed by the year and the place, a title and then the vignette about something or someone, written in the beautiful and intense, sometimes ironic, prose of Galeano; it ends with a reference to the sources, listed in the bibliography, upon which the episode was based (and there is more then a thousand of them for the three volumes...) A chapter can be either directly connected with a latter one, where the story is continued, or only indirectly so, but in either case different chapters, even when unconnected, slowly builds up the story in an almost impressionistic way: small pieces building up the large picture, with the occasional broad stroke to organize the canvas. It is really impossible to convey the sheer beauty of some of the chapters, and the overwhelming sense of admiration with which I completed the reading of the three volumes. The work was originally published between 1982 and 1986, and the first volume starts with a number of native American founding myths and then covers the years from the arrival of the Europeans in 1492 to the end of the 17th Century. ( )

The first in a three-part series, this book is absolutely lovely. Galeano is able to paint a vivid picture of both tragedy and beauty in an enticing fasion. I read the other two books and they are also highly recommended. ( )