Eduardo Galeano was imprisoned for his writing in Uruguay, and when he was released he fled for exile in Argentina in 1976. Many of the people who opposed these dictators were “disappeared”, in many cases taken up in airplanes and dumped into the ocean. These dictators ran roughshod over the people they were supposed to be governing.

In the 1970s Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru were all ruled by United States-sponsored dictatorships. “ I write for those who cannot read me: the downtrodden, the ones who have been waiting on line for centuries to get into history, who cannot read a book or afford to buy one.” I found this method quite compelling for me, it does qualify as literature of a high order. However later he decided the more fragmentary style of writing was more effective in getting his messages across. Galeano had started out writing more traditional history, fiction, and analyses of Latin America with his ‘Open Veins of Latin America’ and his ‘Memory of Fire’ trilogy. These brief texts are illustrated with line drawings by Galeano himself. I would classify this book as an enlightened journalism. Here are parables, paradoxes, dreams, anecdotes, and fragments of autobiography. It is a collection of short scenes or ideas for us to contemplate. Most of the items are about people who actually lived and events that really happened. ‘The Book of Embraces’ is a collection of short passionate vignettes or word pictures. subject is nothing less that the variety of human life and love.‘The Book of Embraces’ by Eduardo Galeano (1989) – 272 pages Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Befrage In The Book of Embraces, Galeano goes out on the tightrope and then levitates in the air above it. The Book of Embraces is a mosaic, or Deigo Rivera mural in words.

is a dangerous radical storyteller, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, like Isabel Allende, and like Pablo Neruda before them. subject is nothing less that the variety of human life and love. In 'The Book of Embraces', Galeano goes out on the tightrope and then levitates in the air above it. The factual skeleton of the author's life is given flesh and blood in his strangely beautiful book, in which poetry, fiction, autobiography, history, fantasy and political commentary mingle and reinforce each other in unexpected ways. Galeano's surreal drawings complement the text, blending wild imagination, pointed satire and old-fashioned charm.

to his own life and the contemporary scene. In an enchanting book of wonders, Uruguayan writer Galeano applies the collage-like technique of 'Memory of Fire'.

The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano