Issue 194 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published February 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review

Choosing favourite books is partly an exercise in nostalgia, remembering the impact the books had the first time you read them, but it also involves dismantling some myths about books you thought were favourites, but which disappoint on rereading.

The first two books on my list were published in England ten years ago, but came out in Spanish and were published in Cuba and Nicaragua a few years before. The first, Days and Nights of Love and War, by Eduardo Galeano, is fragments of reportage, diary, history, set in Latin America in the decade of military dictatorships when Galeano, a Uruguayan, was part of the great exile culture of the continent. In the 1970s and early 1980s Latin American revolutionaries were shining examples of brave defiance.

Galeano's writing is funny and moving, and this book is a great introduction to his important study of imperialism Open Veins of Latin America. Elsewhere Galeano has written with passion and near despair of the defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution after a decade:'National dignity lost the battle in the recent Nicaraguan elections. It was vanquished by hunger and war: but it was vanquished as well by the international winds that are buffeting the left with greater fury than ever... the Sandinistas are not to blame either for the war or the hunger... those responsible for the war and hunger are celebrating an election that punished the victims.'

Omar Cabezas's book, Fire From the Mountain, subtitled The Making of a Sandinista, is a wonderful evocation of the vanished world of confidence in transformation which took young university students like him into the mountains of Nicaragua to fight Somoza's dictatorship. Loneliness, fear, hunger and cold come near to overwhelming him, but Cabezas has a dogged stubbornness and a humour which keep him going.

Gilles Perrault's A Man Apart is also the story of an inspirational man: Henri Curiel, founder of the Egyptian and Sudanese Communist Parties, logistician of the Algerian FLN's European supply network, assassinated in Paris in 1978. Curiel was an Egyptian Jew, son of a millionaire. Driven by utter disgust at the country's poverty and fired, by Marxist ideals, he and his friends organised classes for workers, translations of political works, meetings and newspapers.

Repression, prison and torture took their toll and broke their organisations but, Perrault writes, 'The most clear sighted of Henri Curiel's comrades knew that their role, essentially transitory, consisted of taking up and passing on the torch.' In the early 1980s Perrault found young Egyptian Communists jailed by Sadat who were sustained by stories about Curiel from the 1950s. Like all Perrault's books this is contemporary history with an extraordinary wealth of detail.

Another of his fascinating books is available in English--The Red Orchestra, the story of Leopold Tepper, the Polish Jew who was the head of the Soviet spy network in occupied Europe during the Second World War.

Of all Simone de Beauvoir's meticulous chronicles of her exemplary life, A Very Easy Death, a farewell to her mother, is the warmest and most touching. The honesty which is de Beauvoir's great gift in all her writing, both journals and fiction, makes this at times almost unbearable to read, but it is also a wonderful record of the toughest transition everyone has to go through.

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is also a painfully honest book which reads more like a personal struggle for autonomy and political coherence than a novel. It is as relevant and readable as when it first came out in 1962.

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, from its famous opening, 'Happy families are all alike., every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,' and the introduction to the Oblonskys, through the tragedy of Anna to the happiness of Kitty, is a feast of characters which stands more rereading than any other novel I know.