What happens when the author of a widely taught “anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-American” book comes to “disavow” his own work decades later? No big deal for his fans, many of them college professors who teach it, according to The New York Times:
For more than 40 years, Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” has been the canonical anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-American text in that region. … But now Mr. Galeano, a 73-year-old Uruguayan writer, has disavowed the book, saying that he was not qualified to tackle the subject and that it was badly written.
It’s full of “extremely leaden” prose, Galeano told a book fair in Brazil last month: “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over.” His own agent said Galeano grew “horrified by the prose and the phraseology” of the book. And shockingly…!
In his remarks in Brazil, Mr. Galeano acknowledged that the left sometimes “commits grave errors” when it is in power… “Reality has changed a lot, and I have changed a lot.”
Just a result of getting old, his American publisher says:
Mr. Yates said Mr. Galeano might simply be following in the tracks of the novelist John Dos Passos, a radical as a young man “who became a conservative when he got older.”
It’s a good opportunity for students to learn they don’t have to be uncritical leftists forever:
Caroline S. Conzelman, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said her first thought was that she wouldn’t change how she used the book, “because it still captures the essence of the emotional memory of being colonized.” But now, she said: “I will have them read what he says about it. It’s good for students to see that writers can think critically about their own work and go back and revise what they meant.”
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