You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome this afternoon to Bookworm.

My guest is Eduardo Galliano, the author most recently of the Book of Embraces, perhaps best

known for his three-volume fictional history of the American continent under the title

Memory of Fire.

First volume, Genesis, the second volume with faces and masks. The third

is Century of the Wind. This book, the most recent, published by W. W. W. Norton in hardcover,

is like the others, a book composed of fragments.

It's made of dreams, of anecdotes, of bits and pieces of observation.

And I began to think about the form of this kind of writing.

The first time I saw anything like it was when I was in college and I read

Julio Cortazars Crenobios and I thought I'd ask you about that kind of writing, now essay,

now poetry, now incantation. Yes, I suppose I'm strongly influenced by Julio, not only in my way of writing, but also in everything else.

He was my friend, and he was a very magical person, contagious person.

And this kind of text, this patchwork, where does it come from? I don't know. It comes from a process I made inside me, you know.

And I remember the first time I began working with this sort of collage of short texts was in a book.

I wrote at the end of my period of exile in Argentina,

1976 called Days and Nights of Love and War.

And later I developed it in the three-volume work about history, you just mentioned.

...