The Book of Embraces

The elliptical, collage-like collection of short narrative pieces that make up Eduardo Galeano’s 1989 work The Book of Embraces takes as its subject matter the ways autobiography, anecdotes, dreams, political theories, and parables can be blended into a “sweeping critique of colonial culture, pop culture, dictatorships, and market-based economies.” Translated by Cedric Belfrage, Galeano’s writing tackles a panoply of genres and is unified by the narrator’s mordantly funny voice—suffused with a dark humor that jokes in the face of crisis. The writing is accompanied by Galeano’s hand-drawn illustrations.

A native of Uruguay, Galeano was exiled from the country from 1973 to 1984 after a military coup took power and imprisoned him for his leftist beliefs. Most of The Book of Embraces is a reaction to being an exiled artist, and Galeano writes about the “culture of terror” that pervades Latin America. For Galeano, writing from within a system of oppression forces an author to give precedence to specific elements over others. For him, the most important thing is described by an expression he says originated with Argentinian fishermen: the semipensante, or the half-thought that necessarily manifests but is suppressed from being spoken aloud. The job of a writer is to break through this suppression, calling forth the reader’s imagination and freeing the mind and soul.

The book is composed of a series of short pieces of prose, many taking up less than a page, that are not narratively connected but do cohere in a thematic way. They are divided into sections ambiguously titled, such as “The Origin of the World,” “Prophecies,” “Forgetting,” and “The Celebration of Contradictions.” Most are Galeano’s reflections on incidents from his own life, or from the lives of his friends and family—poets, writers, and artists who have lost their dignity under tyranny while still trying to create.



The first set of pieces is essays that are analytical and dry in tone. Galeano criticizes the complacency with which some in Latin America accept dictatorships, mocking that in those countries “It doesn't bother anyone very much that politics be democratic so long as the economy is not.”

The book then becomes much more personal, as opinion pieces give way to intimate reflections on Galeano’s own life and the experiences of his friends. These memories and reminiscences are mixed with Indian legends, fragments of daydreams, and paradoxical encounters, ranging from both Galeano’s life in Uruguay and his years of exile in Spain and Argentina.

One such piece is Scottish poet and a scholar of South American literature Alastair Reid recounting how confused his neighbors were when they saw an advertisement for a rowing machine—why would you want to row in place and not end up anywhere after the effort?



Another is the story Paraguayan footballer Nelson Valdes tells about a Havana bus trip where the driver pulled over in order to woo a girlfriend, and the passengers revolted against this unplanned stop by commandeering the bus.

A series of short pieces explores the dreams of Galeano’s wife, Helena. She sees “a woman in a tower wearing a white tunic and combing her tresses, which reached down to her feet. The comb shed dreams replete with all their characters: The dreams flew from her hair into the air.”

Galeano describes the graffiti he sees decorating walls during his travels. Memorable ones include a note scrawled on a fence in Melo, a small Uruguayan town: “Assist the police: torture yourself.”



He also writes movingly about very personal medical and psychological traumas like Helena’s miscarriage and his own heart attack.

One of the last pieces deals with Galeano’s experience of returning to Uruguay after his period of exile ends. The generals who had been left in power by the coup have slowly lost their grip on the country. As he returns, Galeano feels a powerful and new kind of homesickness: “I felt I was returning without having left: Montevideo, sleeping its eternal siesta on the sloping hills of the coast, indifferent to the wind that beats on it and calls to it…And I knew that I had been longing for home and that the hour for ending my exile had struck.”