Genesis (Memory of Fire Trilogy) [Paperback]

Eduardo Galeano (Author), Cedric Belfrage (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Memory of Fire Trilogy | Publication Date: June 17, 1998

"From pre-Columbian creation myths and the first European voyages of discovery and conquest to the Age of Reagan, here is 'nothing less than a unified history of the Western Hemisphere... recounted in vivid prose.'"--The New Yorker

A unique and epic history, Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy is an outstanding Latin American eye view of the making of the New World. From its first English language publication in 1985 it has been recognized as a classic of political engagement, original research, and literary form.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Memory of Fire is devastating, triumphant... sure to scorch the sensibility of English-language readers. (New York Times )

An epic work of literary creation... there could be no greater vindication of the wonders of the lands and people of Latin America than Memory of Fire. (Washington Post )

[Memory of Fire] will reveal to you the meaning of the New World as it was, and of the world as we have it now. (Boston Globe )

A book as fascinating as the history it relates.... Galeano is a satirist, realist, and historian, and... deserves mention alongside John Dos Passos, Bernard DeVoto, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (Los Angeles Times )

About the Author

Eduardo Galeano is also the author of Open Veins of Latin America, Days and Nights of Love and War, The Book of Embraces, We Say No, and other works. He is a regular contributor to The Nation. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Cedric Belfrage was an author, journalist, translator, and co-founder of the radical weekly newspaper the National Guardian. English by birth, he was deported by the U.S. government back to England in 1955, and later became the translator for the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393317730
• ISBN-13: 978-0393317732
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #722,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A history of the Americas to learn from, October 20, 2002

By 

C. Dyer (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Genesis (Memory of Fire Trilogy) (Paperback)

This is the poetic telling of the story of the colonization of the western hemisphere. In that it is focused on recreating that which was lost, it is a one sided retelling, but unlike another reviewer suggests, in this book, not all Europeans are demonized because of some politically correct guilt on the part of the author inspired by a trite view of the noble savage. Indeed, the actors in the vignettes related (men, women, Indians, Europeans, entire cultures, religions) are full of remarkable moral complexity and depth. Reading Genesis, one is left saddened at the tremendous loss, enriched by the sight of the magical colors Galeano pulls out of the air as he reconstructs lifestyles so thoroughly forgotten by modern culture, and finally embarassed by our darker human nature. In the end, it is the rapacious greed that destroyed so much that is indicted in this book. The writing is never heavy-handed despite the obvious ease with which one could attack the European practices; rather the author allows the stories of injustice to unfold and gives the reader the opportunity to understand how this has shaped the world we live in. This book is recommended reading for anyone who has forgotten what a great story history is.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Memory of Fire Trilogy by Eduardo Galeano, January 8, 2008

By 

Terence Clarke (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Genesis (Memory of Fire Trilogy) (Paperback)

Here is a typical complete chapter from surely the strangest book of history I've ever read.

"1927: San Gabriel de Jalisco: A Child Looks On
"The mother covers his eyes so he cannot see his grandfather hanging by the feet. And then the mother's hands prevent his seeing his father's body riddled by the bandits' bullets, or his uncle's twisting in the wind over there on the telegraph posts.
"Now the mother too has died, or perhaps has just tired of defending her child's eyes. Sitting on the stone fence that snakes over the slopes, Juan Rulfo contemplates his harsh land with a naked eye. He sees horsemen -- federal police or Cristeros, it makes no difference -- emerging from smoke, and behind them, in the distance, a fire. He sees bodies hanging in a row, nothing now but ragged clothing emptied by the vultures. He sees a procession of women dressed in black.
"Juan Rulfo, a child of nine, is surrounded by ghosts who look like him.
"Here there is nothing alive -- the only voices those of howling coyotes, the only air the black wind that rises in gusts from the plains of Jalisco, where the survivors are only dead people pretending."

The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's trilogy Memory of Fire contains the books Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind, from the last of which this chapter comes. Taken together, the books make up a compendious and riveting history of the Americas (mostly Central and South America). But this is no academic history. It does follow a chronological timeline through the last five centuries or so. But each chapter tells a small story, like the one above. Hundreds of historical figures wander, curse, pray, converse, make love, die, are transformed or obliterated in these pages. And each story is an anecdotal parable that contributes to a single long history of almost total cruelty.

And the history of The Americas is one of cruelty. Starting with the creation myths of several American Indian peoples, Memory of Fire continues through the history of those Indians prior to the invasions of their lands by Europeans, almost the only sanguine section of the entire trilogy. Then, Galeano proceeds to the invasions themselves, which include stories of myriad individual Indian headmen, priests and women warriors, mystic Indian truth tellers, those who would tell of future disasters, and tribal chiefs misled by their own oracles... as well as the thousands of adventurers, holy men fanatics, pirates, crazy dictators, soldiers, mercenaries, prostitutes and treasure seekers that came with the conquerors.

The single constant theme in all this is that of the crushing defeat and murder of the defenseless by the powerful. Prior to the nineteenth century, the defenseless were all the Indians from both The Americas, and the Blacks who were brought to the American continents as slaves. Later the defenseless were made up of peons, indentured servants, peasants rendered landless by oligarchs and self-serving governments, Jews, socialists, communists and syndicalists, as well as those poor, ragged few Indians and Blacks still left standing.

So... the nine year-old Juan Rulfo is witnessing the horror of an event during the Mexican Civil War of The Cristeros in the 1920s that was fought between conservative Catholic peasants and the leftist government of the president Plutarco Calles. Calles had disenfranchised The Church, taken away Church lands and basically banned the public display of almost every Church activity.

I personally think that some version of this was a good idea, given the general treatment of Indians and peasants by the Church in South America for hundreds of years. It's a story of wholesale genocide justified by the prayerful murmurings of self-serving Catholic priests, beginning with those who accompanied Hernan Cortes. Someone like Bartolomé De Las Casas, a Spaniard who was the first bishop of Oaxaca, Mexico, and who defended the rights of the Indians before the Spanish court, was a distinct rarity. Most other priests victimized the Indians in the same way the secular conquistadores did, though with the direct approval of the Christian God, which made it even more shameful a history.

What made The War of The Cristeros so strange was that it was fought by Mexican Catholic peasants in God's name against Calles's government, in order to maintain the ascendancy of established religion in Mexican society. That the majority of Mexican Church fathers stood to the side, caring little for the peasants, seems to have been lost on the peasants themselves. Thousands of them died horribly in this war.

The rage of The Cristeros had been enflamed by official Church umbrage at anti-clerical government policies, and a few years later The Cristeros were hung out to dry when that official Church colluded with the government in a very cynical agreement to end the war. The peasants were used, they died in droves and then they were abandoned.

Juan Rulfo himself went on to become a major Mexican literary figure, the man who wrote the novel Pedro Paramo, which is frequently cited as central to the South American "Boom" of such later writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa and so many others. The spectral figures that Galeano writes about in the passage above are very like those that Rulfo himself describes in his story of a man's search through a heat-blasted Mexican countryside for the truth about his father Pedro Paramo.

The Memory of Fire trilogy is made up of hundreds of such stories, and each gives a view of history that would almost never be found in the usual kinds of history books. Galeano was trained as a journalist, but it is my belief that he is a kind of inspired novelist/poet who, as it happens, found the vein for his work in the themes of history.

You may need a more traditionally written history of South America to make complete sense of all the people of whom Galeano writes. But I think everything you'll need can actually be found in the amazingly encyclopedic bibliography that Galeano provides. Each chapter is punctuated with references to the books that he's read, in which he's found the stories he tells. Taken together, the books in his bibliography form a complete guide to the history of every country in The Americas, or at least of Central and South America.

But Galeano's own interpretation of all this is, for me, the most emotionally truthful take on the history of South America that's ever been written.

Terence Clarke (www.redroom.com)

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History of the Americas told in a unique style, January 29, 2004

By 

Gail Moore "avid reader" (vancouver canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Genesis (Memory of Fire Trilogy) (Paperback)

The author has drawn from many sources to compile this beautifully written history of the Americas, told in a couple of hundred short chapters, each a mini story of a legend or historical event presented in chronological order. Part one of the book, called "First Voices" recounts ancient legends and creation myths of the first peoples of the Americas, later comes contact with Europeans - the "discovery" years then conquest. Volume One of the trilogy takes the reader up to 1700 and recounts more stories from South America than the Caribbean or North America, though all parts of the Americas are touched.

Wish now I had read this more slowly, rather than reading this straight through like a novel, a few of these chapters a night would have been better, so many horrific stories of cruelty, oppression and genocide one after another were hard to absorb, overwhelming greed is really the theme. Such a waste of human knowledge and experience, the destruction of the ancient books of the Mayans by the Catholic church was a loss for all humanity.