Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2008)
Eduardo Galeano (1940)
Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried
391 pages
History can often seem distant and disconnected from our everyday lives --- of little relevance to our understanding of ourselves. Even for recent events this can be the case: if they have not affected us directly, their impact seems to fade quickly from memory, leaving a muted remnant if lasting at all. Do we though really exist so separated from history, or do we perhaps disregard a bit too rashly the past that has led to our present?
In Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, writer Eduardo Galeano demonstrates that we have much to learn about ourselves in the history we ignore or may be ignorant of. Presenting short vignettes of histories that range widely across time and geographic location, he tells stories of events, people and peoples through which he invites us, compels us really, to discover more about ourselves. This compilation of some 600 stories, most less than a page long, recall a world history by turns wondrous and banal, melancholy and cruel. Reading them reminds us that people who lived in times and places far removed from us had hopes, dreams, struggles and disappointments not so different from those that color our own lives. At the same time, on the darker side, Galeano confronts us with a history teeming with examples of people exhibiting wanton cruelty, or at best a greedy, self-interested rationalization of the existence of such cruelty, leaving us to recoil in horror at what may lie buried in some corner of our own soul.
Galeano acknowledges in the ‘almost’ of his book’s subtitle that he cannot cover all the stories of mankind’s long past, but he nonetheless manages to embrace the broad sweep of our history. In one of the first stories in the book, Galeano makes clear in just a few short words the immense distance mankind has traveled since our earliest ancestors began to spread outward from the plains of Africa:
Maybe we refuse to acknowledge our common origins because racism causes amnesia, or because we find it unbelievable that in those days long past the entire world was our kingdom, an immense map without borders, and our legs were the only passport required.(2)And, from those earliest beginnings, Galeano carries us through to our conflicted post-colonial present of borders often artificial and militarized, making the biting observation toward the end of the book that:
The war in Iraq grew out of the need to correct an error made by Geography when she put the West’s oil under the East’s sand.(353)
Along with stories that touch on more these more general themes of our past, Galeano focuses in many of the vignettes on the lives of particular historical figures; some are quite famous, such as Mao Zedong, Winston Churchill or Mark Twain, others much less so, such as an officer in the Argentinian army known as the Blond Angel, who tortured and disappeared several nuns and other women, or a Cuban teenager who attended one day of literacy class and was so inspired by the idea of reading that he went off to a remote mountain village to teach it to others, learning each lesson for himself in preparation for teaching it the next day to his students. In these biographies we come face-to-face with hopeful recollections of people who tried to change the world for the better as well as cautionary tales of the evil that others have committed.
Among these stories, Galeano creates beautiful, if haunting, moments, capturing in particular the strain of melancholy that runs through much of human history. To take just one example: in an anonymous story set in a quiet bedroom centuries ago a heart-wrenching scene plays out that we can just as readily imagine happening in myriad locations throughout our modern day world:
The Art of Drawing YouIn a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover.
On the wall, his shadow flickers.
The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die.
It is still dark. The woman takes a coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow.
Those lines will not leave.
They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave. (51)
For all the moments of hope and achievement captured in these stories, Galeano’s overarching theme lies in the inhumanity --- whether willful brutality or a willful blindness to brutalities being committed --- that mankind has perpetuated and continues to perpetuate on the poor, the weak, the other, as well as on the earth itself, its land, its water and its animals. If my experience reading these histories is any guide, there will be stories here that will describe such a level of evil that your first instinct will be to assume it cannot be true; but, when you query your preferred search tool, and investigate for yourself, I expect you will be as dismayed at what you find as was I.
Other reviews / information: A review by Neil Gordon of this book appeared in the New York Times Book Review.
Galeano has written a set of three books in a similar style that recount the history of the Americas from before Columbus to the present day. They are titled Memory of Fire, with the three volumes titled, <i>Genesis</i>, <i>Faces and Masks<i/> and <i>Century of the Wind</i>, respectively. I have read the first, so far, and can highly recommend it. Read quotes from this book here.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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