Well… I have mixed feelings here. The whole book is a blend of poems, short narratives, and mythological vignettes. It's all very magical. Usually magical defeats me in a matter of moments. I smell magic and I'm laying on my back like a beta dog with my belly exposed saying "show me more shiny."
But something was missing in the completion of the vignettes as stand alone pieces. It read to me like the author quite often ended the segments with a sort of blase regard for the piece itself. Like, he was relying on the stories aligning in some productive way. They don't always do that though.
Now, please notice that this book is illustrated with woodcut prints from a man named Borges (not that one). There are dozens of these prints of grayscale demons and monsters and people and animals throughout the pages. So many that I grew bored of them. As I grew bored with the poems and stories, which seemed to trail off at times, without even employing one of his trademarks (a pleasant sort of contextual zeugma, where a predecessor affects two unlikely referents at the end, a sort of flat Sherlock Holmes moment).
I'll leave speculation aside, except to say that if taken as a positive, this all amounts to a quite democratic array of stories, poems, myths, fables, allegories and visual representations. If taken as a negative, it is a slightly overweight book that, even in its sparer moments, feels like some lack of effort was allowed in honing the finished manuscript. And who am I to say that that's not okay?
There are some incredibly visionary moments throughout the second half of the book. I really enjoyed the longer narratives. I almost gave it three stars, but I want to be discriminating, and I found I did not want to continue reading this book 3 out of 5 times that I picked it up.
I see Galleano in a cape at the post office, reprimanding the postal clerk for wondering aloud whether his book was actually media or something less mythically inclined.
Terribly,
Luke