Babak Fakhamzadeh
Dick couldn't get the book published when he wrote it, the story finally saw a public release after his death.
It's easy to see why it took 30 years for the the book to be published.
The story is competent, just, but really not very interesting. Just meanders, without any clear objective nor any real conclusion. Just not very interesting.
As in his other work, Yanez gets the emotional flow of this novel exactly right, creating a short story, or, really, the nucleus of a film script, that's immersive, easy to relate to and very touching.
That said, there's room for some polishing, allowing for this short to be much more than its length would suggest.
Yanez' story could be the Abre Los Ojos to someone else's Vanilla Sky.
Borges' stories are like dense summaries of potential novels. They all evoke sci-fi alternate realities and could be worked into entertaining creations. In that sense, his stories still feel relevant. However, they also, now, decades after they were written down, fail to be original. Conceptually, perhaps because of Borges himself, stories like these have been worked into mainstream books and movies.
The essays I found terribly dated and tedious, the collection of parables was enjoyable.
Bingham is the guy who in the 1910s uncovered Machu Picchu. This book was published shortly after the Second World War.
Interesting, though the book feels dated. Bingham takes his time and more recent research has overturned some of Bingham's theories.
Additionally, the chapter on Incan history is very lightly sourced when not quoting dubious colonial sources ad verbatim.
The second part of the book is a diary of Bingham's explorations in discovering Machu Picchu. Though Bingham is credited with the discovery of the lost city, he's very forthcoming about not nearly being the first. Several European visitors had visited the site in the 19th century, of which Bingham found evidence on site, and it was through local knowledge, including two farmers working on the edge of Machu Picchu, that he found the actual location.
Bingham plausibly suggests that Machu Picchu not only was the last city of the incas, but also the first of the dynasty, making it hundreds of years old at the time of its abandonment, shortly after the arrival of the Spanish.
Bingham's extensive descriptions of his excavations are tedious and opaque, repetitive and lacking photos and schematics.
Interesting factoids: Quecha (the language of the Incas, still spoken today) has only one word for ‘work' and uses the same word for ‘enemy' and ‘soldier', but has a host of words to describe drunkenness.
The language of the book feels oversimplified and is often very repetitive, which gives the story a tedious and childlike quality.
The events of the lead character feel fairly true-to-life, even if pretty much everything that could have gone wrong does go wrong, adding to the constructed, surreal, quality of the story.
Has a middle part with excellent prose but is also a bit uneven. The main story is good, of the half American half Mexican boy who moves with his mum from America to Mexico to end up working in te household of Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo before becoming Trotsky's secretary, moving back to the U.S., becoming a celebrated writer and then being denounced for being communist.
But, the story in which it is wrapped, of his secretary putting all his notebooks and letters together and adding her own thoughts, feels overly constructed.
Isabel Allende, in the introduction, praises Galeano's ability for story telling, ending with one of his quotes: “It is worthwhile to die for things without which it is not worthwhile to live”.
Sounds great, but, both Allende and Galeano fled their countries at the onset of dictatorships. Galeano twice, even, after he first moved to Argentina. Apparently their money and connections, allowing them to not have to face the dictatorships in their home countries, was worth more than anything they could have fought for at home. No reason to die if you can keep on living the way you like, after all.
Primarily, Galeano's book is a long litany on the abuse of Latin America. First by Europeans, then by Americans and local elites.
Writing in 1970, when most colonies had just received independence, and the US secret service was manhandling Latin American politics, Galeano's overview was an important document, at the time, but feels dated, myopic and tedious, some 45 years later.
Perhaps, Galeano's primary achievement was to unlock an obfuscated history of the Latin American continent. But, his regular quoting of Marx shows Galeano's leanings. Praising Cuba from wanting to move away from overly relying on sugarcane production, ‘Cubans [now] work for 12 months a year in the he continuous job of building a new society', he then goes on for a dozen pages praising communism in Cuba.
And, his leftist vision clearly coloured his anti-imperialist views, where he casts everything in the light of exploitation; the Europeans are exploiting Latin America. If not the Europeans, the Americans are exploiting Latin America. If not the Americans, the local elites as puppets of the Americans are exploiting America. If heavy machinery is bought from abroad, it's a gift to the west, instead of a benefit to the Latin American country in question. Galeano too much wants to make it appear that there has only been exploitation since Colombus arrived in the Americas.
But, only focussing on the negative (and praising the indigenous peoples to a fault) Galeano could have written a very similar story about every continent.
The book's very lightly sourced, putting in question some of Galeano's conclusions and claims. And, some of the footnotes that are there, were added later, so it's for example not clear who proclaims that ‘all Soviet-made heavy equipment is of excellent quality, though that is not true of consumer goods produced by its light or medium sized industry', either way betraying the author's myopic leftist vision.
Galeano is harsher on the Brits, the Dutch and the Americans than he is on the Portuguese and Spanish. Primarily, because he casts the latter in a light of abuse by the former, during the period of colonial exploitation of Latin America. However, this was a full consequence of Spain's conscious behaviour, Spain believing that it could just sit back and enjoy the taxes on trade as spoils of ‘owning' the continent. But, as a result, Spanish industry died a slow death, eventually bankrupting Spain, while the UK and Northern Europe in general laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution, thanks to the huge profits they reaped through trade coming from Latin America.
In the end, Galeano's harping on about how Spain and Portugal did not benefit from their Latin American possessions, sounds like him being an apologist for the Iberian peninsula. Spain and Portugal benefited vastly. They just didn't let their riches facilitate the change that was required in view of how Northern Europe was using those exact same riches.
Galeano's story is very one sided. Though some Europeans immensely profited, the common European did not. Living and working conditions in industrial Northern Europe were abysmal during the industrial revolution, though, granted, not as bad as for slaves in Latin America. However, the feudal system which lasted in Eastern Europe until the early years of the 20th century, was little better than what could be found in Latin America.
And, Galeano's style reminded me of the more recent anti-European African elite, only seeing problems as coming from outside their own countries with the actors they agitate against in their vision being in total conspiratorial control of world affairs: ‘The firm, Anderson, Clayton, not content with dominating the cotton business, had even broken into the candy and chocolate fields.'
Where the book fails is that it lacks any hint of a suggestion towards a solution. Galeano only rants. The only advocation is briefly mentioned at the end of the book, where he calls for a revolution from below, which is fitting, if not too useful, considering he wrote the book shortly after the upheavals of 1968.
It's therefore salient that though Latin America has indeed made a shift to the left over the precious few decades, it also very strongly did that on the back of capitalist society, the very thing so vehemently denounced by Galeano.
Apparently, Galeano did not realise that the root cause of this continuous exploitation is the collection of very weak states, under which capitalist actors can, unpunished, do as they like.
Excellent little novel, set in the Peruvian Andes, seemingly roughly around the same time as the hostage crisis related in Ann Patchett's Bel Canto.
There's a disjoint between coastal and mountain Peruvians, and leftist armed insurgents roam the land. Meanwhile, people disappear in a small mountain town.
Rashid coined the term ‘the new great game' for the power play in Central Asia.
Published shortly after 9/11, and though meticulously researched in extensive detail, it also is fairly clear the publication was rushed, with a few sloppy mistakes here and there.
For example, though the book acknowledges he killing of Masud a few days before 9/11, the book's conclusion talks about him as if he's still alive.
The author crisply allows a picture to emerge of a highly fractioned, highly opportunistic, collection of Islamic flavored groups jostling for control.
And, Rashid shows that a Taliban controlled Afghanistan is basically a bunch of uneducated rednecks who happen to be Muslim and use their religion to justify their actions, which have little to do with their faith but are in fact the product of the culture the Taliban came from, rural southern Afghanistan, with on top of that the norms and values surrounding the religious schools of Pakistan, where a lot of their support came from.
Rashid goes on to show that the fundamentalist unrest in large parts of the Muslim world in the 1990s was a direct result of the U.S. sponsoring of the Mujahideen in the 1980s, followed by the unbridled radicalization that went unchecked but was still funded by the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, afterwards.