Finding wonder in the work of a writer I’ve not read before is not dissimilar to the early days of a romance. Those early weeks and months of enchantment are enlivening, energizing, as I go through the joyful immersion in their work. In that first flush, I allow the thrill of enchantment to have its way, knowing that more  level-headed scrutiny will have its day.

The wellspring of enchantment is capricious and very personal. This year has been rich with the discovery of the work of Ágota Kristóf, Denton Welch and lately Eduardo Galeano. They have delighted whilst the work of Barbara Pym and Jens Bjørneboe has left me untouched.

After Mirrors, I couldn’t resist more Galeano. While I await delivery of his Memory of Fire trilogy, I found today a nice edition of Voices in Time.

Orion Vall, who works with newborns at a hospital in Barcelona, says that the first human gesture is the embrace. After coming into the world, at the beginning of their days, babies wave their arms as if seeking someone.
Other doctors, who work with people who have already lived their lives, say that the aged, at the end of their days, die trying to raise their arms.
And that’s it, that’s all, no matter how hard we strive or how many words we pile on. Everything comes down to this: between two flutterings, with no more explanation, the voyage occurs.

Whereas in Borges’s The Book of Sand, the characters are terrified by the infinite book, in the case of Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, I wished never to finish this book for, in a sense, like the sand, it has neither beginning nor end.

Galeano’s six hundred stories are a portrayal of the world in its totality, a maddeningly finite book with an infinite meaning. Such a book is, of course, an unsettling prospect for a reader. Each of the stories stand alone but the book’s rhythmic intensity is established by the juxtaposition of the stories, which use anticipation and omission to carry a reader along.

There is a hypnotic quality to the succession of stories, so beautifully told that I wished for their infinite replenishment, but it is also a book of deep and infinite sadness, an indictment of the shameful history of the state, most particularly the relentless of European and American tyrannization.

West African sculptors have always sung while they worked. And they do not stop singing until their sculptures are finished. That way the music gets inside the carvings and keeps on singing.
    In 1910, Leo Frobenius found ancient sculptures on the Slave Coast that made his eyes bulge.
    Their beauty was such that the German explorer believed they were Greek, brought from Athens, or perhaps from the lost Atlantis. His colleagues agreed: Africa, daughter of scorn, mother of slaves, could not have produced such marvels.
    It did though. Those music-filled effigies had been sculpted a few centuries previously in the belly button of the world, in Ife, the sacred place where Yoruba gods gave birth to women and men.
    Africa turned out to be an unending wellspring of art worth celebrating. And worth stealing.
    It seems Paul Gaugin, a rather absent-minded fellow, put his name on a couple of sculptures from the Congo. The error was contagious. From then on Picasso, Modigliani, Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Moore, and many other European artists made the same mistake, and did so with alarming frequency.
    Pillaged by its colonial masters, Africa would never know how responsible it was for the most astonishing achievements in twentieth-century European painting and sculpture.

Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors. Portobello Books, 2009 (2008).

At the end on the 1920’s, advertising beat the drum to spread marvellous news: “Fly, don’t ride.” Leaded gasoline made you go faster, and going faster meant getting ahead in life. The ads showed a car going at a snail’s pace, and the embarrassed child inside: “Gee, Pop, they’re all passing you!”
    Gasoline with lead additives was invented in the United States, and from the United States a barrage of advertising imposed it on the the world. In 1986, when the U.S. government finally decided to outlaw it, the number of victims of lead poisoning around the world was incalculable. It was known all along that leaded gasoline was killing adults in the United States at a rate of five thousand a year, and causing irreparable damage to the nervous systems and mental development of millions of children.
    The principle authors of this crime were two executives from General Motors, Charles Kettering and Alfred Sloan. They have gone down in history as generous benefactors of humanity. They founded a hospital.

Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors. Portobello Books, 2009 (2008)