1.
MIRRORS
By Christian Tyler
Financial Times (London)
December 12, 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c211db1c-e514-11de-9a25-00144feab49a.html
[Review of Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano. Translated by Mark Fried. Portobello, 2009. £18.99. 391 pages.]
This book is hard to classify. Billed as “a history of the world, refracted,” it is more intelligible as a subjective miscellany in 600 mini-chapters.
Eduardo Galeano’s history is chronological, but makes no pretence to impartiality. Each chapter is a vignette (what at school we used to call a “gobbet”) occupying no more than two-thirds of a page. The style is aphoristic, the headings ironic, the tone of voice sardonic. Galeano uses a kind of literary pointillism to build up his picture. Yet no coherent picture emerges from the glitter of the mosaic.
If there is a theme, it is the irremediable cruelty of mankind. The author, a Uruguayan writer and re-patriated refugee, dwells on cruelty: the unashamed use of slaves in classical times and later, the harrying of heretics and non-Christians by the medieval Church, the persecution of ethnic minorities, the exploitation of native peoples in the colonial age, and, throughout history, the abuse of women by men.
He has little good to say about European civilization (“Europe looked in the mirror and saw the world”) and is not much kinder about its American heirs. He thinks Castro’s Cuba maligned.
Asian cultures fare rather better. The Japanese artist Hokusai, who is said to have changed his name 30 times and moved house 93 times, is admired for his self-deprecation. Genghis Khan, whose Mongol armies were perhaps the most savage in the pre-mechanical world, gets off lightly: his methods are described, albeit ironically, as “indelicate.” Galeano is at his most positive in his micro-portraits, especially of obscure heroines. Of his better-known heroines, the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg earns more than a page to herself for her critique of the undemocratic Bolshevik regime.
There are lighter moments, and interesting nuggets that no conventional history would have room for. Did you know that women in ancient Rome thought it contraceptive to sneeze immediately after making love? Or that that the model for Botticelli’s Venus, a Florentine girl called Simonetta, was wooed (but not won) by Amerigo Vespucci, who discovered South America? Or that Joseph Guillotin, the French doctor whose name was attached to the guillotine, actually opposed capital punishment?
In some cases, the author’s reason for including an item is far from clear. There are also jarring anachronisms: a sideswipe at George W. Bush in an item on the invention of writing in Iraq. There is occasional bathos; and a number of obvious misprints: “Epicurius” for the Greek philosopher, “Sienna” for the Italian city, and “404 BC” as Bishop Ussher’s dating of the Creation.
It is no criticism -- rather the reverse -- to say of Galeano’s book that it defies categorization. But readers need to know how to measure what they are getting, and that is impossible in a book which does not list a single source. Galeano pleads lack of space for the omission. But perhaps he does not mean us to be too concerned with historical accuracy, just as he is not too concerned himself with historical objectivity.
Sparsely illustrated with engravings of monsters from an exhibition at the Madrid National Library in 2000, the book comes with a commendation from Isabel Allende for the power of its writing. This is true of the non-polemical passages, such as this description of stalactites and stalagmites: “. . . born from the sweat of rocks in the depths of caves . . . reaching down or reaching up, drop by drop, searching for each other in the darkness.” But the writing is uneven, perhaps having lost something in its translation from the Spanish.
In an earlier age, the author might have cast this history as a great epic poem. It has that feel. As it is, Mirrors asks to be read as it is written, in very short takes. It is a gloomy book, if occasionally enlightening -- the perfect Christmas present for a pessimist.
--Christian Tyler is author of Wild West China: The Taming of Xinjiang (John Murray).
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