Series
Publication
Siglo XXI (2001), 352 p.
Original publication date
1982 (Spanish), 1986 (English)
Collections
Subjects
Awards
American Book Award (1989)
Description
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.
User reviews
LibraryThing member jveezer
When I was a young reader, somewhere between 12 and 15 years old, I read Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway. I was enamored with mythology and epics and Vikings and the sources of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The Heimskringla certainly satisfied my cravings for those
Eduardo Galeano’s Genesis is full of the same crimes of genocide and greed approved and sanctioned by the pontiff and the Church. But this time, the narrative was closer to home, on the borrowed shores of my own country and continent. The Incas, the Aztecs, the Mayans, Mapuche, the Araucarias, and so many other cultures put to the sword or enslaved to work the mines, plantations, and houses of the colonizers. Their knowledge, heritage, medicines, and books were mostly destroyed by the ignorance and cruelty of the colonizers and the Inquisition. It’s bloody and shameful history, but it’s history that we need to know and acknowledge. It’s history we can use to break free of the cycle of colonial exploitation that is still alive and well.
Galeano shares this history in little vignettes of beautiful prose and poetry. It’s a great way to touch on the history of the America’s without the dullness and drabness of your standard history book. He tells the stories sometimes with humor, sometimes with irony, sometimes with grim detail. But always with that beautiful language that is the trademark of the best of the Latin and South American writers.
Genesis is the first book of the trilogy and covers creation to 1700. I’m stuck in time because I don’t have the second book yet. The vagaries of my used book love means I’ve only happened across the first and third book. I’m particular about my books so I have to find a decent hardback edition somewhere in order to move my history lesson along. But I loved this book so I might have to scrape the dollars together to seek a copy out on the Internet instead of waiting to stumble across it during my bookstore peregrinations. Usually I would have waited to start the trilogy until I had all of the books in my possession but an article on the author prompted me to start despite my unpreparedness.
Reading Galeano brought me back to those feelings of my adolescence and has me pondering spirituality and faith and the path I’ve been on for fifty-odd years. It’s made me ponder racial prejudice and entitlement and the role imperialism has in perpetuating those vices. That’s what the best writers and books do for me. And unlike the purity-obsessed Spaniards of the 16th century, I’d be proud to have the blood of the indigenous Americans flowing in my veins. My heart goes out to them and I am sorry for any part my ancestors played in this sad history. But I will finish this trilogy and can see myself revisiting it again just as I do the more familiar histories and stories of the native North American cultures.
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things but it also had a very unexpected result. It finally severed my remaining faith in, or relationship with, Catholicism and Christianity. Beautifying a man who slaughtered people and converted them with the choice of Christianity or the sword was not my idea of a Saint. What would Jesus Do? Pass. No Sainthood for you. Please take the elevator on the right. It only goes down. This was another example where the institutions, dogma, and priests corrupted the legacy of the man upon which the religion was founded.Eduardo Galeano’s Genesis is full of the same crimes of genocide and greed approved and sanctioned by the pontiff and the Church. But this time, the narrative was closer to home, on the borrowed shores of my own country and continent. The Incas, the Aztecs, the Mayans, Mapuche, the Araucarias, and so many other cultures put to the sword or enslaved to work the mines, plantations, and houses of the colonizers. Their knowledge, heritage, medicines, and books were mostly destroyed by the ignorance and cruelty of the colonizers and the Inquisition. It’s bloody and shameful history, but it’s history that we need to know and acknowledge. It’s history we can use to break free of the cycle of colonial exploitation that is still alive and well.
Galeano shares this history in little vignettes of beautiful prose and poetry. It’s a great way to touch on the history of the America’s without the dullness and drabness of your standard history book. He tells the stories sometimes with humor, sometimes with irony, sometimes with grim detail. But always with that beautiful language that is the trademark of the best of the Latin and South American writers.
Genesis is the first book of the trilogy and covers creation to 1700. I’m stuck in time because I don’t have the second book yet. The vagaries of my used book love means I’ve only happened across the first and third book. I’m particular about my books so I have to find a decent hardback edition somewhere in order to move my history lesson along. But I loved this book so I might have to scrape the dollars together to seek a copy out on the Internet instead of waiting to stumble across it during my bookstore peregrinations. Usually I would have waited to start the trilogy until I had all of the books in my possession but an article on the author prompted me to start despite my unpreparedness.
Reading Galeano brought me back to those feelings of my adolescence and has me pondering spirituality and faith and the path I’ve been on for fifty-odd years. It’s made me ponder racial prejudice and entitlement and the role imperialism has in perpetuating those vices. That’s what the best writers and books do for me. And unlike the purity-obsessed Spaniards of the 16th century, I’d be proud to have the blood of the indigenous Americans flowing in my veins. My heart goes out to them and I am sorry for any part my ancestors played in this sad history. But I will finish this trilogy and can see myself revisiting it again just as I do the more familiar histories and stories of the native North American cultures.
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LibraryThing member LibroLindsay
I liked Galeano's approach to non-fiction here and enjoyed reading the vignettes at first. It became harder and harder for me to follow after a while, though, and I found myself wishing I was just reading one solid story instead of bouncing around the Americas each page. This is just my preference
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and no real fault of the text--the text is beautiful and heartbreaking and creative. I may pick up the next book in the trilogy a little while down the line. Show Less
LibraryThing member dryfly
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.
LibraryThing member FPdC
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,
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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. Show Less
LibraryThing member isabelx
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
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.
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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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member LASC
Part 1 of the trilogy Memory of Fire
LibraryThing member Kristelh
Completed book one of Memory of Fire by Galeano. A history of Americas from early beginnings of the indigenous people up to the beginning of the 1700s. History with commentary, written with perspective of the people makes it a living history story.
Language
Original language
Spanish
ISBN
9789682312021
Physical description
352 p.; 5.51 inches
Pages
352