About the book:
In this book, there are flashes of life that help you take a minute with yourself and see if you still insist on what you are and consider correct?! Or will you stand up and put an end to some of them and take the right path with greater strength, determination and will?!
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".
The characters of this novel are searching for a different life. Some of them leave their work in the cotton factory and become sex workers in the hot springs resort, while one of them enters prison of his own accord in search of calm. A third goes to her hometown, discovering strange caves and tunnels, while a fourth chooses a refuge in A rural province, where Chinese herbs are used in traditional medicine.
These characters are intertwined in multiple emotional and physical relationships, while each of them seems like a mirror of the other, as the story of each of them begins where the previous one left off, in a fluid temporal structure.
In this novel, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, Tsun Shieh writes about the meaning of life in its relationship to love, sex, birthplace and work, and about the vanishing border between life and death, between wakefulness and sleep, in a blurry and turbulent plot full of sensual descriptions and vivid metaphors. , its aspects resonate with echoes of magical realism.
