Among the central characters of the last part, Century of the Wind , is Miguel Marmol, a revolutionary labor organizer, who survives tortures and escapes from execution. They are not giving him rum to drink or the water of life brought from Malaga, because nothing is left but to wait for the convulsion that will tear him from the world. Memoria del fuego was widely praised by reviewers. The structure of the book was considered as fascinating as the history it related and Galeano was compared to John Dos Passos and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This trilogy by one of South America's most darting and accomplished authors is impossible to classify.
Reality speaks a language of symbols.
Each part is a metaphor of the whole. In his childhood Galeano had dreamed to be a soccer player, as many Latin American young boys. Galeano compares soccer with a theater performance and war, he criticizes its unholy alliance with global corporations but attacks leftists intellectuals who reject the game and its attraction to broad masses because of ideological reasons. It combines urban and rural oral tradition and insights into Latin-American reality with illustrations typical of the popular literatura de cordel . Galeano has been married three times - in 1959 to Silvia Brando, in 1962 to Graciela Berro and in 1976 to Helena Villagra.