Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

Philip Hensher reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

Like many writers - "a subset of readers," Alberto Manguel calls us - I am a creature of libraries, and can trace my life through each one habitually used. New Malden branch library; Broomhill (a lovely Edwardian villa in that queen of suburbs); Sheffield central library; the Bod; the Cambridge University Library, always feebly abbreviated to the UL; and the London Library.

And, as Manguel says in this remarkable and lovely book, our personal libraries, too, are "reflections of the owner", carapaces into which we fit neatly. Libraries are living things, and have their own lives, as surely as books or people do. Nowadays, of course, the idea of the library is under attack, and many librarians seem the last people who should be left alone with a book and a waste-paper basket.

Nicholson Baker has chronicled the brutal assaults on library stock carried out by librarians, but it hasn't stopped. The librarians of the university I teach at, Exeter, regularly toss out irreplaceable volumes without any consultation, to the point where academics have to loiter around skips to rescue anything important.

The tragedy is that nobody has ever invented a piece of such durable and portable technology as the printed book, and it has, thus far, proved irreplaceable. Manguel tells an amusing story of the BBC, which, in 1986, celebrated the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book by putting the whole thing on computer discs.

Sixteen years later, those discs proved impossible to read by any technological means. The Domesday Book itself was still fine, but if it had been, say, a 19th-century newspaper rather than a 12th-century manuscript, it would have long been consigned to the flames by a librarian, and lost for ever.

Manguel's study addresses the idea of the library, which will always be incomplete, and empty both of books that remain to be written, and books that remain to be found. Somehow libraries, both shared and private, fill up with complete surveys of the most surprising subjects.

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Argentine Literature

Interview with Mario Benedetti

Juan Cruz interviews Mario Benedetti.

Cómo nacen mis libros es un misterio. Porque de repente estoy meses sin escribir, y de pronto aparece, plaf, ahí está, vuelve la escritura. Aparecen de golpe, con sus títulos y todo, con la división de capítulos. Pienso que eso le pasa a todos los escritores, que un nuevo libro les surge como un secreto que se revela...

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Uruguaian Literature

Post Boom Novels

Alberto Manguel selects sixteen post-boom novels. (In Spanish)



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Latin American Literature

Interview with Leonardo Padura

Jane Jakeman interviews Leonardo Padura.

Leonardo Padura's prize-winning series of novels about Cuban detective Inspector Mario Conde has changed the face of Latin American crime writing, taking a conventional formula into the category of dark and serious literary fiction. Havana Gold completes his sweeping portrait of Cuban society, seen through the ironic vision of his louche, sensual and intelligent cop. Here, Conde searches for the murderer of a teacher who has been strangled, and the quest takes him back to the school where he studied.

Padura has written of Conde as whispering in the writer's ear, and of the Havana Quartet as a joint decision between character and author. Yet Conde, though he has many consolations in the form of cognac, cigars and occasional sexy women, sometimes suffers from a form of anomie that leaves him in despair. During his visit to London, I ask Padura, a man of warm and lively empathy, whether he and Conde are one and the same. He explains that Conde is a pair of spectacles through which he can observe Havana.

"Conde is fiction, but he has many of my own characteristics," he says. " We belong to the same generation. This is a very important thing in Cuba, because it's the generation that was practically born with the revolution. All my intelligent life happened with the revolution. We grew up in its romantic period – the Sixties and Seventies. I remember in school we had posters that said that the future of humanity belonged completely to the socialists.

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Cuban Literature

Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The Informers

Alastair Sooke reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez' The Informers.

Colombia is not well known here as a theatre of the Second World War, but its wartime years form the backdrop for Juan Gabriel Vásquez's new novel. An absorbing afterword, which should have been printed at the beginning, fills us in on some of the history.

After war broke out, the American government panicked that National Socialism would spread through Latin America. It was especially jumpy about important strategic zones such as the Panama Canal and neighbouring countries, particularly Colombia.

In 1941, Eduardo Santos, the Colombian president, agreed a series of accords with the US, including the building of military bases on the Caribbean coast and the implementation of a "blacklist" drawn up by the Americans that July.

According to Vásquez, the objective of the "Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals" was "to prevent the economic and commercial activity of persons and companies opposed to US defence policies" - put simply, to block Axis funds in Latin America, and elsewhere.

By May 1942, 630 Colombians supposedly sympathetic towards the Third Reich were on the list, their assets frozen. Inevitably there were injustices: the US embassy blacklisted some citizens on the basis of little more than rumour and prejudice whipped up by a network of self-interested informers.

After a German submarine sank a Colombian schooner two years later, the new president, Alfonso López Pumarejo, opened detention centres for blacklisted citizens, confining many German exiles to a luxury hotel in the small city of Fusagasugá, two hours from Colombia's capital, Bogotá.

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Colombian Literature

Albert Sánchez Piñol: Pandora in the Congo

Michael Eaude reviews Albert Sánchez Piñols' Pandora in the Congo.

Albert Sánchez Piñol's second novel is an action-packed adventure story in the best Rider Haggard tradition. It is also a parody of such novels and a sophisticated reflection on the imaginative power of literature. More complex than Cold Skin, the Catalan author's novel of terror on an Antarctic island, it shares a nightmarish closed space where the protagonists face the attacks of non-human assailants. What they really face is their own fear.

Here the closed space is a clearing in remotest jungle where the aristocratic Craver brothers, fleeing disgrace in England, seek their fortunes in a gold mine. As the mine deepens, first a strange half-human woman they call Amgam emerges, and is at once enslaved as a sexual object by the Cravers. Then masses of Tectons, as they name the underground creatures, pour out of tunnels to attack them. Only Marcus, the gypsy servant, gets out of the jungle to tell the story.

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Spanish Literature

To lend a book is an incitement to theft

Great article by Alberto Manguel.

Since my library, unlike a public one, requires no common codes that other readers must understand and share, I’ve organized it simply according to my own requirements and prejudices. A certain zany logic governs its geography. Its major divisions are determined by the language in which the books are written: without distinction of genre, all books written originally in Spanish or French, English or Arabic, come together on the same shelves. (I allow myself, however, many exceptions: Certain subjects — books on the history of the book, biblical studies, versions of the legend of Faust, Renaissance literature and philosophy, gay studies, medieval bestiaries — have separate sections.)

Certain authors are privileged: I have thousands of detective novels but few spy stories, more Plato than Aristotle, all Zola and hardly any Maupassant, almost all of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick. I have dozens of very bad books that I don’t throw away in case I ever need an example of a book I think is bad. The only book I ever banished from my library was Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” which I felt infected the shelves with its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain. I put it in the garbage; I didn’t give it to anyone because I wouldn’t give away a book I wasn’t fond of. Nor do I lend books. If I want someone to read a book, I’ll buy a copy and offer it as a gift. I believe that to lend a book is an incitement to theft.

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Latin American Literature

César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry

Eric Ormsby reviews César Vallejo's The Complete Poetry.

Vallejo did to the Spanish language what earthquakes did to Spanish masonry. He sent it flying, exploding verbs, twisting nouns, subverting New World Castilian with slang, neologisms, and fragments of Quechua, the indigenous language of the northern Andean region, where he was born March 16, 1892. His poems pulverized Spanish, then reassembled it, often in fantastic ways. How can such a poet, who baffles Spanish readers as much as he electrifies them, be translated into English?

The answer seems to be, only by the work of a lifetime. Clayton Eshleman has now accomplished this feat in "César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry" (University of California Press, 730 pages, $49.95). Mr. Eshleman has been wrestling with Vallejo's impossible poetry for nearly 50 years. (I still recall the impact of his early version of Vallejo's "Human Poems," published by Grove in 1968.) The present volume offers Vallejo's four books in definitive versions, most of which have been revised, corrected, and polished dozens of times over the decades. It contains as well a foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, an illuminating introduction by Efraín Kristal, a detailed chronology by Stephen M. Hart — the latter are both leading Vallejo scholars — notes, a bibliography, and a moving "Translation Memoir" by Mr. Eshleman.

Mr. Eshleman remarks of Vallejo that "the man I was struggling with did not want his words changed from one language to another." His translations thus represent struggles with a stubborn ghost, and are all the better for it. When Vallejo invents the untranslatable verb "to autumn" ("otoñar") in the line "and the cattle-bells autumn with shadow," Mr. Eshleman recasts it as "the cattle-bells are autumncast with shadow," a lovely solution. But his true ingenuity shows in his handling of Vallejo's notorious "experimental" verse.

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Peruvian Literature

Alvaro Mutis: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

John Updike reviews Alvaro Mutis' The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll.

The problem of energy, in this enervated postmodern era, keeps arising in Mutis's pursuit of a footloose, offhandedly erudite, inexplicably attractive shady character. A lowly seaman with some high-flying acquaintances on land, Maqroll is a drifter who tends to lose interest in his adventures before the dénouement is reached. Readers even slightly acquainted with Latin-American modernism will hear echoes of Borges's cosmic portentousness, of Julio Cortázar's fragmenting ingenuities, of Machado De Assis's crisp pessimism, and of the something perversely hearty in Mutis's fellow-Colombian and good friend Gabriel García Márquez—a sense of genial amplitude, as when a ceremonious host sits us down to a lunch provisioned to stretch into evening. Descriptions of food consumed and of drinks drunk, amid flourishes of cosmopolitan connoisseurship, are frequent in Mutis, even as the ascetic Maqroll goes hungry. North Americans may be reminded of Melville—more a matter, perhaps, of affinity than of influence. Gaviero in Spanish means "lookout"; Maqroll was one as a boy, in his first years at sea—"I had to climb to the top of the tallest mast and tell the crew what was on the horizon"—and Ishmael, too, was a topman, feeling himself, "a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts," and revolving within himself "the problem of the universe." Both writers, through their wayfaring alter egos, stubbornly stare at a universe that, though apparently devoid of God, seems still to brim with obscure metaphysical import. "And some certain significance lurks in all things," Ishmael reasons, "else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher."

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Colombian Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Miranda France reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

sabel Allende appears to lead a charmed life. The Chilean author of The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna has sold more than 50 million copies of her books and has loyal fans all over the world. Each morning she leaves her Californian home and walks through the garden, past the swimming pool, to the summer house where she writes her novels. That's after her lover has donned a "jaded sheikh dressing gown" and made her freshly ground coffee. Why can't my lover do that?

Of course, where families are concerned, nothing is ever as perfect as it seems. The first few pages of her third volume of autobiography hint at discord in Allende's extended family, which she calls "the tribe". By the end of the book it has been exposed as gloriously dysfunctional, requiring the services of psychoanalysts, astrologers, Zen Buddhists and anger-management consultants, among others. There are three drug-addict stepchildren; a daughter-in-law who becomes a lesbian; another child with fertility problems; sundry affairs and ructions.

Looming over all these concerns is the greatest sadness of all: the death of Allende's daughter at the age of 29, in 1992, from a rare genetic disease. A previous memoir, Paula, took the form of a letter to this daughter as she lay in a coma. The Sum of Our Days is also styled as a letter to Paula, informing her of events in the family since her death.

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Chilean Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Michael Pye reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

Isabel Allende minds neing short, and short women are like short men: they take over whole worlds to compensate. She has made wonderfully vital fiction out of the margin between the spirits and the facts of life, she channels the heart of an older generation of popular writers, the generous entertainers, and makes it new. She even reinvented the masked avenger Zorro.

This makes her infuriating to the more po-faced and correct among us because she's an improper Hispanic, maybe a bit too upper class, willing to use the exotic in her background because she knows it fascinates; because she doesn't genuflect before her own name, which she shares with the Marxist icon Salvador, the murdered president of Chile; because she uses so much of what we're meant to take seriously as magical realism just to give us a very good time, and she does it with obvious intelligence.

She also has a personality so strong it rushes off the page, a remarkable presence even in translation (which says a great deal for Margaret Sayers Peden, her regular translator from the Spanish). She's wonderfully self-aware, as when she confesses, assuming we'll think her plain: "Pretty women in my books die before page 60."

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Isabel Allende

Jackie McGlone interviews Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende does everything in Spanish – she dreams, cooks, yells at her beloved grandchildren when they're naughty and, of course, writes her bestselling books in her native language. "I even make love in Spanish. I would feel a fool panting in English," she says, greedily spooning the chocolatey froth off her cappuccino.
"It is decaffeinated, isn't it?" she asks the waitress in the London hotel in which she is staying on her British book tour. "If I have any more caffeine, I will be like this," impersonating a silken-clad jumping bean. "I am too much that way anyway."

She can say that again. Allende may be tiny but she packs a powerful, passionate punch, both in print and in person. She is, she alleges, a lipsticked Amazon who slays her own dragons.

Although she claims to be jet-lagged after flying from London to Barcelona, with her husband Willie Gordon – for the day for the city's Book Day, when everyone is given a book and a red rose – she looks wonderful. Gamine featured, with an enviably smooth, pale complexion and lively, watchful eyes the colour of dark chocolate, she is a fierce 65 years old, although she sure as hell doesn't look it. Which, knocking on wood, she attributes to good health and incontinent greed.

"I love dark coffee, wine, chocolate, caviar and vodka, rich, spicy food – everything that's bad for you. I don't stint myself."

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Chilean Literature

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

Peter Ackroyd reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

His book is entitled The Library at Night. Why does he wish to share this nocturnal experience? In the silent hours of darkness the books are enmeshed in shadow, creating a world where there is no beginning and no end, no story and no meaning. At night the volumes can be said to form “a continuous narrative stream in which all genres, all styles, all stories converge, and all protagonists and all locations are unidentified...”. The reader is dipped into the swelling tide of language and is borne away. Yet there may be disadvantages to this experience. The reading of too many books may induce lassitude, wistfulness and fatalism.

Manguel also tells the story of one New Yorker who was literally overburdened with books. At the end of 2003, after a decade of book-buying, Patrice Moore was trapped under an “avalanche” that had descended from the shelves, and was not rescued for two days. He was buried alive by words, and the neighbours could hear him “moaning and mumbling” from beneath the piles of paper. It is a salutary warning to the overenthusiastic reader.

There are more obvious problems with libraries. In one chapter Manguel ponders the intricacies of classification; in another he expatiates on the seemingly infinite accumulation of books in the world. No library will be complete. There are always new volumes to be acquired and ingested.

And, contrary to the rubbish of received wisdom, there is no substitute for the book. Manguel estimates that electronic material can be preserved for a decade at best. That is why books can be considered dangerous. That is why they have been burnt. Libraries have been destroyed so that an indigenous culture can be forgotten; a fanatic priest from Spain destroyed most of Aztec literature, while the book burnings of Nazi Germany and the Inquisition are notorious.

It is written in Ecclesiastes that “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh”. This can be construed as a celebration of, or warning concerning, the plenitude and power of books. The book can help us to interpret the past and to imagine the future. That is the achievement of The Library at Night. Out of the darkness of one man's library shines a beacon.

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Chilean Literature