The Book of Embraces

by Eduardo Galeano, Cedric Belfrage (Translator), Mark Schafer (Translator)

Overview

Parable, paradox, anecdote, dream, and autobiography blend into an exuberant world view and affirmation of human possibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393308556
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/17/1992
Series:	Norton Paperback
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	524,870
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eduardo Galeano (1940—2015) was 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.

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.

Editorial Reviews

"[Galeano] is a dangerous radical storyteller, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, like Isabel Allende, and like Pablo Neruda before them. . . . The Book of Embraces is a mosaic, or Deigo Rivera mural in words."

New York Newsday - John Leonard

"In The Book of Embraces, Galeano goes out on the tightrope and then levitates in the air above it. . . . [His] subject is nothing less that the variety of human life and love."

Alan Ryan Book World

"In The Book of Embraces, Galeano goes out on the tightrope and then levitates in the air above it. . . . [His] subject is nothing less that the variety of human life and love."

Washington Post Book World - Alan Ryan

In an enchanting book of wonders, Uruguayan writer Galeano applies the collage-like technique of Memory of Fire, his fictive historical trilogy of the Americas, to his own life and the contemporary scene. redundant and you later make clear that these are short pieces.aa He writes of his years in exile during Uruguay's military dictatorship in the 1970s, of his heart attack and of his wife's loss of a child halfway to term. His sociopolitical commentaries expose the shallow selfishness and callousness vague. do you mean `cultural character' `lack of individuality'aa? /works without.gs of our time. His targets range from or more vivid:`He skewers...'? aa/leave as is.g political repression in Chile, Guatemala and Marxist Cuba to whites' persecution of Native Americans to the inequities of any system in which ``voters vote but don't elect . . . . Bankruptcies are socialized while profits are privatized.'' Lovers, executioners, fabulous animals, slavish bureaucrats and the numberless poor inhabit his dreamlike parables and mini-stories (many a single page or shorter), which hop from Amsterdam to Hollywood. Galeano's surreal drawings complement the text, blending wild imagination, pointed satire and old-fashioned charm. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This literary scrapbook, mixing memoir, documentary, essay, and prose poem, defies clear-cut genre classification. Journalist/writer Galeano, who claims he writes for the downtrodden, infuses the people and subjects dear to him with his socialist viewpoint and ironic poignancy, typified by such pieces as ``Christmas Eve'' and ``Paradoxes.'' The series of vignettes lacks the thematic unity that pervades the historical reinterpretation of his trilogy Memory of Fire ( LJ 10/1/85, LJ 6/1/87, LJ 5/1/88), since this mixture of politics, art, and literature not only covers a more disparate and heterogeneous content but also obviates chronological progression. An uneven collage that falls short of emulating the jolting vision of his earlier work.-- Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC, Dublin, Ohio

Library Journal