Using diminutive names, such as: “Soso” or “Koba,” Arrabal addresses the leader Joseph Stalin through a long, sarcastic and indignant message, dropping from him the qualities of greatness and deification, so that he returns to a child who deserves rebuke.
Employing his huge and diverse intellectual reserve, Arrabal delves into the details of Stalin’s life, starting from his famous mustache, passing through the women in his life, the spies and henchmen who worked for him, and the poets who immortalized him in weak verses, all the way to his victims, who were many, inside and outside the Soviet Union, and with Therefore, Arrabal does not reveal the sources of his information, nor does he differentiate between facts and fabricated details. He does not seek to present a truly historical document as much as he is interested in formulating a dialectical and moral argument.
Unlike his letter to General Franco, which he sent to the latter while he was alive, writing to a dead dictator may seem like an absurd and useless act, but Arrabal is in fact directing his letter to the living who lived with Stalin, or were influenced by him later, and he is trying in his letter, which seems Closer to a plea in a court; To say: History is unforgettable and cannot be erased.
One spring day, Don Juan lands in the garden of a cook who runs a restaurant near the ruins of a French monastery. A friendship is established between the two, and the adventurous traveler tells his friend on dark evenings his stories with women, each of whom is of indescribable beauty.
There are literary characters who are born and do not die. Over the years, these characters witness multiple births, each time taking on a different form and a new dimension. Among these characters is Don Juan, to whom Peter Handke returns in this novel, to raise many questions, and to present his reflections on love, the spirituality of love, and the passage of time, destroying the common image of his hero, presenting a new one. Claiming that all previous Don Juan characters were fake, and that "Don Juan" is the real and honest one.
In his book “Mirrors,” Eduardo Galeano retells the history of human civilization in his own way, condensing what he finds exciting, funny, and worthy of attention through brief, precise passages that give the reader the opportunity to connect with the events and facts he reads, as if history were resurrected before him. The author adopts a cornological path in narrating a history based on bitter paradoxes, and stops at cities, personalities, events, and inventions that constituted milestones in human history. This is how we see him moving lightly between various topics; Such as female circumcision, silkworms, beer, Santa Claus, tango, the torture instruments of the Inquisition. But through the illusion of dispersion, he somehow makes history more logical and full of bitter irony. With extreme selectivity and absolute freedom, Galeano, with his extensive knowledge, chooses the points that stand out to him that seemed to him pivotal in the path of humanity, specifically the forgotten events or people that the dominant narrative of history ignored and wanted to erase from collective memory, as if he was saying to the world: “See your true face reflected in... Mirror".
