And it was a timely book: within a few years of its publication, freedom in the Southern Cone was smothered by US-backed military dictatorships and dirty wars under the hideous rubric of Operation Condor. Like many of his fellow intellectuals, Galeano was sent to prison. Subsequently he was one of the fortunate ones who made it into exile.

In Spain, his development as a writer led him deeper into the interesting borderland where non-fiction narrative meets literary art. His next major work, a trilogy called Memory of Fire, took eight years to complete. It tells the same story, essentially — the one big story it was Galeano's calling to tell, more or less directly, with every book he wrote — but in this case the short chapters have become one- or half-page vignettes, beginning in the chaos of pre-Colombian myth and continuing with one or a handful of entries for every year from the momentous "first contact" in 1492 up to Reagan-era "rollback". No authorial comment accompanies the sparely sketched, disconnected scenes. It resembles in various ways John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, especially the factual but heavily stylised miniature biographies of historical figures interspersed throughout those novels. But in USA the non-fiction element works as counterpoint and punctuation in a long, complex (and high-class) work of realist fiction. In Memory of Fire there is no fiction — footnotes to each vignette refer to its documentary source in an enormous bibliography. No character is developed for more than a few pages. The odd scene stands out with more effective literary shape than others, but generally there is nothing in the foreground, everything is background. The prose style is low-key. It is basically a work of collage or assemblage — Galeano described it as a mosaic — better appreciated, somehow, as a whole, for its epic scope, than in any one of its constituent parts. But then again, there are those things that neither dry reporting nor fictionalisation will readily serve to relate, for which the strange form of Memory of Fire actually feels indispensible: 

They lie in rows, crushed against each other, their noses touching the deck above. Their wrists are handcuffed, and fetters wear their ankles raw. When portholes have to be closed in rough seas or rain, the small amount of air rises to fever heat, but with portholes open the hold stinks of hatred, fermented hatred . . . and the floor is always slippery with blood, vomit, and shit. 

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