Memory of Fire; I. Genesis Part One of a Trilogy

London: Quarter Books, 1985. Presumed First U.K. Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Joanne Eley (Cover illustration). xvii, [3], 293, [3] pages. Sources. This was originally published in 1982 in Spain as Memoria del fuego, I. Los nacimientos. Eduardo Hughes Galeano (3 September 1940 - 13 April 2015) was a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist considered, among other things, "global soccer's pre-eminent man of letters" and "a literary giant of the Latin American left". Galeano's best-known works are Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) and Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire Trilogy, 1982-6). "I'm a writer," the author once said of himself, "obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia." Author Isabel Allende called Open Veins of Latin America "a mixture of meticulous detail, political conviction, poetic flair, and good storytelling." In 1973, a military coup took power in Uruguay; Galeano was imprisoned and later was forced to flee, going into exile in Argentina where he founded the magazine Crisis. His 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America was banned by the right-wing military government, not only in Uruguay, but also in Chile and Argentina. In 1976 he married for the third time to Helena Villagra; however, in the same year, the Videla regime took power in Argentina in a bloody military coup and his name was added to the list of those condemned by the death squads. He fled again, this time to Spain, where he wrote his famous trilogy, Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire), described as "the most powerful literary indictment of colonialism in the Americas." Genesis, the first volume in Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, is both a meditation on the clashes between the Old World and the New and, in the author's words, an attempt to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America. It is a fierce, impassioned, and kaleidoscopic historical experience that takes us from the creation myths of the Makiritare Indians of the Yucatan to Columbus's first, joyous moments in the New World to the English capture of New York. In 308 vignettes, none more than a few pages long, Galeano's fresh, compassionate, magical voice gives us a vast array of characters: conquistadores, inquisitors, pirates, scholars, poets, European monarchs, native chiefs, slaves, rebels, turncoats, and ordinary people.