Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (review)

Book Previews205 stark black and white photographs live up to Barry Lopez's description of them as "haunted and incisive images." Her pictures of barren landscapes, encrusted shorelines, flooded ruins, and desert faces reward close viewing with multiple levels of detail. Robert Coles writes that "doing documentary work is ... a passage across boundaries (discipUnes, occupational constraints, definitions, conventions aU too influentiaUy closed for traffic) . . . that can become a quest, even a pilgrimage "(145). In Salt Dreams the combination of image and text takes the reader into the heart of the document, not only into landscape but also into individual lives, not only into consequences but also into context. It is a documentary work that extends and expands a vital strand ofcreative nonfiction. Reviewed by Robert L. RootJr. Upside Down: A Primerfor the Looking-Glass World by Eduardo Galeano PubUshed in Spanish as Patas arriba: la escuela del mundo al revés Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1998 365 pages, paper With a lot ofbooks, perhaps most books, readers are invited to sympathize with main characters and narrators, to see through their eyes and think along with their thoughts, to love their friends and hate their enemies. Creative nonfiction books, whose writers are both narrators and main characters , are perhaps a bit different with their authors' self-deprecation and obtrusive fallibility but in the end we often feel even more associated with the author because we, too, are flawed. But I do not think Eduardo Galeano particularly cares what you think about him, and he certainly is not trying to win you over with his charm. What Galeano is, mostly, is angry. Written in the ironic tone of a set of school lessons on such themes as injustice, racism, fear, machismo, impunity, and environmenticide, Upside Down is an intense indictment of the world as is. It is a voice crying in the wilderness, laying bare corruption and injustice. Galeano advocates for the poor, the victims ofsystems, the undesirable byproducts ofa top-down global market economy that consumes resources and Uves almost unchecked. Upside Down pushes the edges ofcreative nonfiction (indeed, some may not wish to see it as such) as it redacts and synthesizes hundreds ofbooks, stories, essays, articles, poems, and songs to form a driven, rhetorical set of essays designed to preach not only to the choir, but to the bUnded and the deceived. Many 206Fourth Genre readers wiU be shocked and incensed by this book, some ofus at the systems Galeano criticizes, some of us at Galeano himself. What's more, the censure extends beyond systems and corporations to individuals—you and me most Ukely—riding the gravy train of prosperity afforded by noble birth in the most powerful country in the world. Do you eat fast food? Do you talk on a ceUular phone? Do you drive a car to work or school every day?You may find such things more difficult once you have read this book. Galeano, born in Uruguay, exiled for twelve years beginning in 1973 during a müitary dictatorship because ofhis political views, and now Uving again in his native country, writes from the left, writes from his own experience and outrage with a keen eye for detaü and irony. He is the real deal, having been imprisoned and banished for his writings; he is a stalwart of his causes who, at least professionally is seeing his steadfast efforts bear fruit. His Memory ofFire trflogy a luminous encyclopedic reteUing ofthe history ofthe Americas, won the American Book Award in 1989, and he himself was awarded a Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 1999. Upside Down furthers the author's aims of exposing injustices and weakening power structures. So what makes the writing creative? What makes this literature? The essays are based on articles and commentaries, but they are not articles or commentaries. Their lessons and morals are paraboUc and sometimes abstruse, like fiction's. The prose writing is rhythmic and fluid as poetry. I usuaUy don't want a list of sources at the end of an essay, but in this case I am wiUing to make an exception because of the power of the presentation. Granted, there are sometimes long sections—so...