TRYING TO KEEP up my South American literature momentum after Zama and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, I picked up the second volume of Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, which I had been vaguely intending to get to ever since I read the first volume back in...well, let's just say it was a while ago.
I'm not sure the English translation of Memory of Fire is still in print, although apparently digital versions are available. It's brilliant. Imagine a history of the Western Hemisphere, focusing mainly on Central and South America, in three volumes, each volume a thousand close-printed pages. Then imagine each of those 1000-page volumes trimmed down to its most vivid vignettes, personalities, and episodes, the details and events likeliest to stick in your memory, so you have three books of about 250 pages apiece. That would give you something like Memory of Fire.
The first volume, Genesis, covers the Americas from their pre-historic dawn up to the end of the 17th century, and the second, Faces and Masks, covers the 18th and 19th centuries. Galeano adopts a leftist perspective, so the 18th century is mainly about ruthless colonial exploitation and enslavement, the 19th century mainly about efforts at independence and liberation that end up largely benefitting the better-off, but he generally avoids being explicitly political, instead letting the stories speak for themselves. Therein lies the genius of the book. Brilliant vignette follows brilliant vignette without any big conclusions being drawn or morals pointed out, but the overall message is impossible to miss.
Along the way we meet quite a few figures comparable to di Benedetto's Zama and Machado de Assis's Brás Cubas, parasites parading their entitlement. We also meet some of the people who were pushing back and working for change--and I expect we will meet a few more of those in the trilogy's third volume, on the 20th century: Century of the Wind.
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