Latin America Reading Group
Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces
Thursday 27 June 2013
Café Ventana, 8:00 p.m
Suggestions for Discussion, Musings, Debates
What’s a favorite chapter? Read it aloud to us.
What’s a favorite theme? (See Index in the back of the book.)
What do you make of Galeano’s structure?
What was familiar to you in the course of reading Galeano?
What was strange, new, or difficult for you about The Book of Embraces?
What do you learn from Galeano about Latin American politics, cultures, and peoples?
This book was published in 1989. Given his preoccupations, what has stayed the same, and what has changed in Latin America, since then?
Follow-ups
Try this: list 30 people you know. Write a couple or three paragraphs about an encounter you had with each of these people. Come up with titles, some of which may apply to more than one person. Voilà: You’ve just started your own book (or novel, or essay…). See also the Korean writer Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives.
Try this: Watch Even the Rain (Spanish: También la lluvia) is a 2010 Spanish drama film directed by Icíar Bollaín about Mexican director Sebastián (Gael García Bernal) and executive producer Costa (Luis Tosar) who travel to Bolivia to shoot a film depicting Christopher Columbus’s conquest. Sebastián and Costa unexpectedly land themselves in a moral crisis when they and their crew arrive at Cochabamba, Bolivia, during the intensifying 2000 Cochabamba protests, which their key native actor Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri) persistently leads. The film was directed by Icíar Bollaín, based on a screenplay by Paul Laverty. (Wikipedia)
Next Month
4th Thursday, 8:00 p.m., Fatima’s
