Customer Reviews

Genesis (Memory of Fire Trilogy)

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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.

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)

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.

Galeano presents us American history not in the typical fashion of just important dates, battles and personages...although you will find it here too, he goes beyond that presenting us a living breathing american history from a wide array of sources...the project is truly ambitious, perhaps too ambitious at times as he also attempts to include North American history, although these volumes focus the heart on the Latin Americas... this first volume culls myths from the Incas, Mayas and many others presenting a an enchanting world where people lived among the trees and animals free...it's a world that changes with their first encounter with the first European explorers...Galeano himself admits that in these volumes he will reflect his own stands for history cannot be objective lest it become sterile...he passionately endeavors shows history the way he sees it, for better or for worst...for me it was an exciting read from the first page to last, as my mother is Latina ...thus the book served as a discovery of my very roots as well, roots that I have now grown to understand with this passionate portrait of the Americas...

How great that the Uruguayan writer's masterpiece is reaching the wide readership these reviews evince. As an American, I am pleased. I'm referring here to the whole of the trilogy, not just its first volume. For those of you who want to learn the non-colonial-view of the Americas - the view of the defeated, of the enslaved, of the murdered - these books are the thing. The books are written, not in the conventional style of a history book, but in very brief chapters, each addressing one particular event. And through the mass of these seemingly isolated events, the history of these countries emerges in all its ruthlessness and grief. These books should make every reader reflect upon both past and present. I would like to remind the United States readers that, even though you call yourselves "Americans" and your country "America", there's a lot more of it to the south as well!!! And, even though your country and ours share a painful common past, you have surmounted much of the suffering and social injustice that still take place here. In that sense, Galeano's trilogy is a deeply enriching path to social and historical awareness. I have only one criticism to make, and that concerns his treatment of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and John Donne's "To his Mistress going to Bed", which he scathingly depicts as samples of the worst colonialistic attitude. This uncharacteristically simplistic view deliberately misinterprets the works' context, and overlooks their great beauty in order to use them to make a political point. This is the only disappointing feature in an otherwise magnificent work.

I originally purchased the first volume of this Trilogy (Memory of Fire). After reading a few pages of the first volume, "Genesis", I rushed to get the remaining two volumes.
Galeano has an amazing ability to write, even with translation, in a compelling and magnificent historical-fictional style. The narrative flows from year to year over the centuries in these volumes and gives the reader a wealth of knowledge that reshapes many of the "historical" accounts he or she has been taught. I suspect that is the case whether one is a citizen of the United States or not.
Certainly, for the North American reader os Galeano's Triology, whether we are reading about the 1400's or 1900's, each page surprises. His work spans an immense ammount of time and the reader, perhaps not an historian, is amazed at the degree to which he or she has been utterly swept through history.
Not an historian, myself, it is perhaps enough to say that the literary quality of these volumes is compelling. I have read the three volumes, given my set away to someone who had not read it, purchased it again and read it yet again.
Accusations of "bias" against the work, which has its foundations in historical evidence, are improper. It is perhaps enough to say that Galeano writes from a distinctly Latin American perspective.
These volumes in a poetic fashion, despite some of the terrible events of the history they record.

An amazing combination of history, literature, and poetry.
I highly recommend this book to anyone.
Another good book by Galeano that conveys a lot of the
economic history of South American colonization in greater detail and can be read along with this trilogy is The Open Veins of Latin America.

This book starts out with the legends of the native Americans about where things originated. It's a great bit of ancient history and some of it rather amusing. I have only begun to read the rest of the book, but so far am very impressed by the writer's style. He is very expressive and gives the reader a feel for what the subjects are feeling/thinking.

Here begins Eduardo Galeano's "Memory of Fire," a landmark experiment in historical writing that deserves to be much better known, especially in the United States. Galeano begins his history of the Western Hemisphere with a section of tales and episodes from Native American mythology. Undated, they suggest the timelessness of myth, a time and place outside of what we have been taught to call 'history.' With the arrival of Columbus, "history" proper, in the European sense of the word, begins. Galeano, however, continues to tell his tale in myth-like vignettes, a kind of nonfiction magic realism that continues through the next two volumes, bringing the story of our terrible and beautiful side of the planet up to 1984.

An eccentric history of the Spanish conquest of America, it brings home the horror of that event like nothing else I've read while being a literary tour de force as well. Again, this is one people will disagree about.