Eduardo Galeano

Mirrors

(Nation Books)

Book Review by Adam McKibbin

Despite being one of Latin America’s most lauded writers, it’s little surprise that the biggest splash Eduardo Galeano made in mainstream America waters (not known as a hospitable ecosystem for sociopolitical literature – nor the notion that America does really bad things sometimes) was when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gifted President Obama with a copy of Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America.

He’s previously considered centuries of history and infamy in the Americas, showing a passion for finding forgotten stories and extracting their often painful lessons.  History may be written by the victors, but Galeano works in the opposite direction; for most American audiences, the clearest parallel would be the work of iconic historian Howard Zinn (a fan of Galeano’s).  With Mirrors, Galeano latched onto a concept even more daunting:  a history of the world, condensed into 600 vignettes.  It’s such a massive undertaking that it wound up being creatively liberating; Mirrors has the soul of a poet more than the soul of a professor, though both may find it a useful addition to their shelves and classrooms.

At first, the format is a little off-putting, but Galeano rises to the challenge with a lyrical work that valiantly keeps pace with the many moods of human history. Myths and facts mingle alongside one another at the outset; gods are covered alongside mortals. As the modern world comes into focus, it's another reminder of how many of our own history books have confused myth and fact (Christopher Columbus, anyone?).

When you have less than 400 pages to explain how we got from a black Adam and Eve to the 21st century, there isn’t much time for context and nuance. So it’s with a broad brush that Galeano is painting, and there are times when his rightful indignation about current and recent events threatens to distort the balance of history.  If the lesson is that history repeats, it’s a lesson that readers could be trusted a bit more to reinforce on their own. Tellingly, George W. Bush makes his first appearance on the ninth page of the history of the world.  In a 23-line history of the persecution of homosexuals – a history that includes the pink triangles of Nazi Germany and the cruelest of capital punishments in countless societies – five lines are devoted to a paranoid quote from Richard Nixon.

Still, those are relatively minor complaints for a work of such scope. Galeno's prose sings and provokes, and surely many readers will be compelled to dig deeper into the many inspiring lives and shameful episodes that appear; it's hard to think of an outcome that would bring a historian more pride. Seemingly a few hundred of the vignettes are ripe for a book or a film all to themselves.

Will ours ultimately be a tale of tragedy or triumph? Galeano doesn't know what to make of it all, either, and memorably considers the question during a section about Darwin. "Now we can't tell if we are God's masterpiece or the devil's bad joke," he writes, going on to list the evidence on either side.

The jury, of course, is still out.