"Hope springs eternal in the human breast!" How encouraging it is to see Uruguayan scribbler Eduardo Galeano, the author of "The Open Veins of Latin America," now stepping away from his influential book. I assumed his stupidity was incurable. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/books/eduardo-galeano-disavows-his-book-the-open-veins.html?_r=1# Of course professors won't drop it from their curriculum, as the article reports.
Maybe Galeano is becoming like American novelist John Dos Passos, a leftist who wrote "The U.S.A. Trilogy," (parts of which are great, by the way) but who became disillusioned later in life and backed Richard Nixon in his presidential runs.
"Open Veins" stands in the great tradition of Latin American literature to blame someone else for regional problems. Probably this started with Rodo's "Ariel." Perhaps the one good thing to come from "Open Veins" was that it inspired "The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot," which may be about Latin America, but it has universal applicability.
No comments:
Post a Comment