Alberto Manguel: All Men Are Liars

Steven Poole reviews Alberto Manguel's All Men Are Liars.

Alberto Manguel is a liar. Or so the reader of this book is invited to think, having enjoyed a peculiarly evasive and suspenseful story told by a rather neurotic and unreliable character named "Alberto Manguel", only to see the next narrator exclaim, at the start of her version of the same tale: "Alberto Manguel is an asshole [. . .] No, nothing is true for Manguel unless he's read it in a book."

If Paul Auster (another man, and also, in one of the senses of Manguel's title, another liar) wore a friendly beard and had more of a Latin temperament, he might produce something like this richly hued, melancholy and funny puzzle of a novel. It centres on a group of Argentinian literary expatriates in 1970s Madrid, one of whose number, Alejandro Bevilacqua, has recently died, apparently falling from his balcony on the eve of publication of a novelistic masterpiece. "Alberto Manguel" and three other characters who knew Bevilacqua address their memories of him to a fifth person, a journalist named Terradillos living in France who hopes to piece together the truth of the deceased writer's life.

The accounts are contradictory in crucial details, but the broad picture that emerges is one of a thin, gloomy man (somewhat Baudelairean in aspect) who grows up in Argentina (falling in love with a puppetmaster's daughter), begins to write (lurid scenarios for photo-romances), is imprisoned and tortured (he doesn't know why, but we eventually do), and then escapes to Spain (where he is irresistible to certain women). One of those women is the narrator who denounces "Alberto Manguel", Bevilacqua's lover Andrea, who finds the manuscript hidden among his belongings and secretly takes it to be published. The title is In Praise of Lying. Andrea comments: "Lying: that is the great theme of South American literature."

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Alberto Manguel: A Reader on Reading

Ian Sansom reviews Alberto Manguel's A Reader on Reading.

It is very rare indeed for someone to have devoted their lifetime to making these complex and delightful reconstructions, to sharing and reporting on their experiences as a reader; much rarer, say, than the many who devote themselves simply to criticism, to judgment or to commentary. It's so rare, in fact, that it's difficult to know what to call it. Manguel might best be described not so much as a critic but rather as a devotee of reading; one thinks of Susan Sontag, or of Clive James – observers, admirers, enthusiasts. This enthusiasm leads to what one might perhaps describe as a sentimental strain in Manguel's writing, though it might also accurately be described as morality, the imaginative extension of oneself and one's sympathies to others. In his revealing essay on erotic literature, "The Gates of Paradise", he argues that in "reading or making love, we should be able to lose ourselves in the other, into whom – to borrow Saint John's image – we are transformed: reader into writer into reader, lover into lover into lover.

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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

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

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

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

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

Swift imagined books battling. In a library described in one of his satires, the volumes do not remain on the shelves but hurl themselves across the room in an exchange of insults and fisticuffs, enacting their disagreements by tearing one another's pages out. What happens, however, when the lights go out? Those belligerent books probably settle down to make love and breed other books. Writers write because they are compulsive readers and they do so in book-lined rooms. Forget about art imitating life: literature is a self-generating, self-referring activity.

The Argentinian bibliophile Alberto Manguel, whose books include A History of Reading, is an expert on this snugly closed circle, symbolised by the private library he has installed in a 15th-century barn in the Loire. Here he sits, preferably at night, with the 'shapeless universe' outside expunged by darkness. Warmed by the pools of light that spill from his lamps, he does not even need to read: the smell of the wooden shelves and 'the musky perfume of the leather bindings' is enough to pacify him and prepare him for sleep. Although the softly sifting 'plankton of dust' shed both by the crinkled pages and his drying skin anticipate a longer sleep, he does not mind. Libraries are storeyed tombs and Manguel is happy to be housed in the funereal stacks.

Within his global, multilingual book collection, he can effortlessly travel in both time and space. He admits the megalomania of the enterprise: it recalls both the hubris of the Tower of Babel, felled by a resentful God, and the acquisitive mania of the library at Alexandria, accidentally torched when Caesar set fire to his own ships. Behind these imperious ventures, and behind Manguel's life-long scavenging in second-hand shops, lies a desire to demonstrate the unity of phenomena, the indexed connection between disparate experiences and the accessibility of all this lore to a single individual.

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Argentine Literature

Interview with Alberto Manguel

Boyd Tonkin interviews Alberto Manguel.

"I could hear the books screaming in their boxes," he reports. "Like everyone else, I had always lived in small places. But now that my children had left home, I thought, maybe I can indulge in having a library." In the southern Loire, he found an old priest's house with a ruined barn attached, in a neighbourhood where "the prices seemed to have frozen before the war... for the Parisians, who set the price of real estate, anything south of the Loire is Africa". A local architect transformed the wrecked barn into a sturdy home – described with envy-inducing relish in The Library at Night – for 30,000-plus books.

So what did it feel like to have them all in place? "I had the sense that something had come, not to an end, but to an age in me. It was as if you have roots for the first time; it's all here. You're somehow complete – coupled with the knowledge that the essence of a library is that it is never complete." Soon after the final tome had reached its designated spot, the barn of books began to overflow. Now they colonise the house, with one bedroom ("we call it the Murder Room") occupied by the detective fiction Manguel writes about so well. The Library at Night wittily shows how every dream of order breaks down, and "the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted". Equally, it argues that the hankering for a flawless system remains a persistent Utopian hope of homo sapiens, the classifying animal.

As a teenage bookworm, Manguel says, "I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library." The fledgling bibliophile worked during school holidays in a local bookshop, Pygmalion. Through that job, he became one of the disciples who read aloud to the blind spinner of labyrinthine, enigmatic tales acknowledged not only as Argentina's greatest writer, but as its greatest reader: Jorge-Luis Borges.

It was "an extraordinary privilege to listen to what went on in the mind of one of the great readers". Borges, blind since his early fifties, planned to write fiction again. He "wanted to see how the great masters had put together their work. So he would comment on the mechanics of the story." Yet the young reader would disagree with the sightless sage: "You have to learn to read on your own... This seems presumptuous. But there was in Borges a fascination with the description of violence and a certain prudery regarding erotic stories; he preferred sentimentalism to eroticism."

"For Borges," he recalls, "everything consisted in creating the right structure out of words; we had nothing but the words to go by. Whatever music or meaning the words carried, we had to remember that they were... untrustworthy tools." Borges would criticise the slips of every writer – including that bodger, Shakespeare.

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Argentine Literature

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

Michael Dirda reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

Book collectors might be presumed to be among the happiest of mortals. There, in the evening, they sit contentedly in soft easy chairs, beneath pools of warm lamplight, surrounded by their libraries -- row after serried row of beautiful or rare volumes, all the great works of scholarship and the human imagination. Sadly, this cozy vision is usually little more than a daydream, though not for Alberto Manguel. As The Library at Night indicates, he has managed to take every reader's castle in the air and put a foundation under it.

From a psychological viewpoint, most bookmen and women are actually among the more unfortunate sufferers on the wheel of life -- for them there is no respite, no relief, from the insatiate ache of desire. Surrounded by plenty, they hunger for more. Collections are never complete. Unsigned modern firsts really do need to become signed or inscribed. Any merely fine copy suddenly looks dingy when compared to one in mint condition. Moreover, as everyone can attest, the exhilaration of actual possession lasts but a twinkling. The newly acquired treasure is soon slipped onto a bookshelf or even, as the bookcases fill up, into a cardboard box stored in the basement or the attic or the American Self Storage in Kensington, Md. And once in a box, the book can never, ever be found when it's needed. Trust me. I know.

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Argentine Literature

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

Nicholas A. Basbanes reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

The 19th century British scholar John Willis Clark once defined a library as a "gigantic mincing-machine into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a slightly altered form as the literature of the present." Clark also regarded libraries as museums in the sense that each is "a temple or haunt of the muses," a sanctuary for the intellect where inspiration issues forth in myriad forms by way of countless sources.

These thoughts came to mind as I was reading "The Library at Night," Alberto Manguel's latest reflection on the miracle of the written word, especially the sections in which the Argentine-born author pays tribute to the 30,000 books he has assembled so painstakingly over the last five decades. "My books," he writes, "hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices."

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Argentine Literature

Alberto Manguel: Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey

Melinda Harvey reviews Alberto Manguel's Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey.

New books crowd our view of old ones. But publishers and authors are culling while they clutter. Thousands of original titles are printed each year and a significant number of them tell us precisely which books to read and how many.

There have been Melvyn Bragg's 12 Books That Changed The World and Peter Boxall's rather more dispiritingly titled 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. Meanwhile, Penguin's slim and chichi Great Ideas titles continue their reign at bookshop counters.

Upping the ante, American publisher Atlantic Books has launched a Books That Shook the World series. Alberto Manguel's Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey is its ninth and penultimate addition. Earthquakes, bombs and asteroids shake the world - but do books? More to the point, do poems? The Republic, The Bible, The Koran, Rights of Man, On The Origin Of Species, The Wealth of Nations, On War and Das Kapital - the focus of the previous eight instalments of the series - can lay clear claim to whipping up seismic shocks on history's timeline. But, as Bragg observes, explaining the absence of novels from his list, literature didn't put men on the moon or clinch the right to orgasm for women.

For Manguel, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Literature has accompanied us every step of the way from the polis to the politburo, and Homer's epics have managed to talk in time, regardless of the ideological beat. Or indeed tribal beat: Manguel tells the remarkable story of a remote jungle people who, supplied with a copy of The Iliad as well as a selection of practical handbooks on farming by Colombia's Ministry of Culture in the 1990s, refused to return it. When the village elder was asked why, he replied that Homer's story exactly mirrored his people's own past - of wars without reason and unhappiness without relief.

Manguel celebrates literature's pat-head-rub-tummy ability to reflect the real world, as well as entertain and move. He notes that The Iliad and The Odyssey have served as geographical textbooks (Strabo), war manuals (Alexander the Great), treasure maps (Heinrich Schliemann), not to mention Ancient Greek primers and civilising agents for countless boys from Horace to today. These poems are also "the beginning of all our stories". Beyond pioneering techniques related to plot, character and point of view in fiction-telling, they have seeded myriad books, from Virgil's Aeneid to James Joyce's Ulysses and beyond to Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates, Derek Walcott's Omeros and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad.New books crowd our view of old ones. But publishers and authors are culling while they clutter. Thousands of original titles are printed each year and a significant number of them tell us precisely which books to read and how many.

There have been Melvyn Bragg's 12 Books That Changed The World and Peter Boxall's rather more dispiritingly titled 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. Meanwhile, Penguin's slim and chichi Great Ideas titles continue their reign at bookshop counters.

Upping the ante, American publisher Atlantic Books has launched a Books That Shook the World series. Alberto Manguel's Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey is its ninth and penultimate addition. Earthquakes, bombs and asteroids shake the world - but do books? More to the point, do poems? The Republic, The Bible, The Koran, Rights of Man, On The Origin Of Species, The Wealth of Nations, On War and Das Kapital - the focus of the previous eight instalments of the series - can lay clear claim to whipping up seismic shocks on history's timeline. But, as Bragg observes, explaining the absence of novels from his list, literature didn't put men on the moon or clinch the right to orgasm for women.

For Manguel, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Literature has accompanied us every step of the way from the polis to the politburo, and Homer's epics have managed to talk in time, regardless of the ideological beat. Or indeed tribal beat: Manguel tells the remarkable story of a remote jungle people who, supplied with a copy of The Iliad as well as a selection of practical handbooks on farming by Colombia's Ministry of Culture in the 1990s, refused to return it. When the village elder was asked why, he replied that Homer's story exactly mirrored his people's own past - of wars without reason and unhappiness without relief.

Manguel celebrates literature's pat-head-rub-tummy ability to reflect the real world, as well as entertain and move. He notes that The Iliad and The Odyssey have served as geographical textbooks (Strabo), war manuals (Alexander the Great), treasure maps (Heinrich Schliemann), not to mention Ancient Greek primers and civilising agents for countless boys from Horace to today. These poems are also "the beginning of all our stories". Beyond pioneering techniques related to plot, character and point of view in fiction-telling, they have seeded myriad books, from Virgil's Aeneid to James Joyce's Ulysses and beyond to Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates, Derek Walcott's Omeros and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad.

That we have read and treasured Homer for more than 28 consecutive centuries is, for Manguel, proof that the poems have shaped, if not shaken, the world. Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey is subtitled A Biography, and Manguel believes a biography of a book is a history of its readers. With a Casanovan mixture of fickleness and genuine affection, we gad about the ages, rendezvousing with a galaxy of authors, artists, scholars and translators for whom Homer mattered. There's the painstaking Aristarchus, the conflicted St Jerome, the ecstatic John Keats and the speculative Samuel Butler, who wholeheartedly believed that The Odyssey was the work of a young unmarried Sicilian woman and not a blind and wandering male bard. The story of Caliph al-Ma'mun, who, after an encounter with Aristotle in a dream, had the entire corpus of Ancient Greek writing translated into Arabic, ensuring its survival, serves as a timely parable for our times. Manguel's world view is a cosmopolitan one: while we should delight in differences, the world is a single civilisation, and Homer is the one thing upon which we all agree.

Manguel exults in unearthing an imprecise decoding of The Iliad by Pope here, a fleeting allusion to Homer by Goethe's Werther there for the same reason that he waxes lyrical about the mutable materiality of books themselves in A History of Reading (1996). Like a slight tear on page 72, a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of a back cover or a handwritten poem on a flyleaf, these are signs of life, proof that literature has a pulse. Like his hero, Jorge Luis Borges, whom he famously met at Pygmalion, a Buenos Aires bookshop, aged 16 and subsequently read aloud to for the next two years, "the concept of the 'definitive text' corresponds only to religion or exhaustion".

Yet one wonders whether this fad for treating books like historical relics is a symptom of literature's decadence. A curiosity of the statistically verifiable decline in reading in our time - the US National Endowment for the Arts's recent study, To Read Or Not To Read, found we read less and less well - is the preponderance of books about books in our marketplace.

In Manguel's books, readers are eulogised as an endangered species. This book harbours more than a hint of nostalgia for the days when people read Homer with passion and with real world issues at stake. As for Manguel himself - well, it's clear he dearly prizes Homer, but what his poems have whispered into Manguel's ear when no one's watching one cannot, ultimately, say.

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Argentine Literature

Interview with Alberto Manguel

Mary Jo Anderson interviews Chilean autor Alberto Manguel.

Alberto Manguel is a master of words and he doesn’t mince any of them.

How fitting that language is the subject of his newest book, The City of Words (Anansi, $18.95), comprising the 2007 Massey Lectures which Manguel will be delivering across Canada over the next few weeks.

"We are being infantilized daily. I believe we come into the world as intelligent creatures and we have to be taught to be stupid."

But against the culturally induced stupor, Manguel posits that story and literature have the capacity to make us more human.

Manguel spoke on the telephone from Toronto as he prepared to travel to Halifax to deliver the first in this series of lectures. (He was scheduled to speak on Friday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.)

Begun in 1961 for the purpose of stimulating public discussion of important social issues, the Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College at the University of Toronto. Every October the selected speaker/author/lecturer, travels to five Canadian cities to deliver one of the lectures. Every November, the CBC Radio program, Ideas, airs the lectures consecutively for one week. (For information visit www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey2007.ca)

Alberto Manguel is erudite, cosmopolitan, and vastly well read. He is a translator, author, editor, and literary critic. His book The History of Reading (Random House, $24), is full of fascinating information and resonant with the passion for reading.

In The City of Words, Manguel examines the concept of nationalism and the idea of "personal and social" identity from the perspective of story and language. As countries fracture and hostilities increase, Manguel asks how — given that "language is our common denominator" — words and story can save us. He also asks whether words will divide and destroy us.

In our conversation (and in the lectures), Manguel asserts that much depends on how language is used. And equally, it is crucial whether questions are posed or answers expounded. For Manguel believes that answers breed dogma and intolerance while questions nurture openness and possibility.

"Answers close us in and literature opens doors and windows for us. It forces us to look further, not be content with what seems like an easy answer," Manguel said.

"It is, I think, exactly what opposes the arts to the kind of society that we are building — in which the notion of value is of financial value and is therefore a closed notion. A closed notion, like a closed book, offers no exploration, no ambiguity, and no spaciousness in which to connect with others. And connection is what language, literature, and stories offer us."

Manguel provides innumerable examples gleaned from many centuries to illuminate the process by which language and art allows us to understand and empathize with people from different cultures while also enabling us to unite as a society.

While discussing the film The Fast Runner by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, Manguel says, "Like other communal tasks, storytelling has the function of lending expression and context to private experiences, so that under recognition by the whole of society, individual perceptions . . . can acquire a common, shared meaning on which to build learning."

Imagination and its off-spring, literature, is a "survival mechanism developed to grant us experiences (that) serve to educate" us, Manguel writes in the lecture, The Bricks of Babel. So what is it that stands in the way of this shared perception, this tolerance of others? How can language be at the heart of the conflicts between religions, cultures, and societies?

The problems arise when the rich language of literature is stripped and co-opted for the purposes of politics and commerce.

In his illuminating lecture in Chapter Five, entitled The Screen of Hal (a reference to the computer in Kubrick’s film, 2001 A Space Odyssey), Manguel states, "Distortions are the essence of demagogical and of commercial language, intent on ‘selling’ an idea or product . . ."

Subtly and gradually, the language of literature, which is "complex (and) infinitely capable of enrichment" is replaced by the "short, categorical, imperious" language of advertising or the "static" language of politics. It is an example of the tail wagging the dog as language is transformed into mere slogans and propaganda.

Manguel cites philosopher and literary critic George Lukacs to explain this "colonization of the world of experience" into "one-dimensional generalizations . . . granting value and identity not through imaginative stories but merely according to what something is said to cost."

And in our conversation, Manguel asserts "there is a deliberate effort made to render us stupid so that we become the consumers that are needed for this society to function."

This "co-opted" language is the language of "statements that cannot be explored without destruction. You cannot open up "Drink Coca Cola" and try to reflect upon it," Manguel says.

"You have to use your mind and on the basis of these words (in a book) that are here offered to you, build a reasoning and an emotion of your own. It is your responsibility. It is your task."

Maybe if we build a city of words, a culture of tolerance, we will not suffer as those who built the Tower of Babel. Maybe we will understand — even as we speak different languages.

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Chile Literature

Alberto Manguel - Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books

Jane Sullivan reviews Alberto Manguel's Reading Diary.

The essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel is one of those increasingly rare beings who live their lives steeped in books. What is even rarer is that he has the gift of passing on his enthusiasm.

A few years ago, he re-read a few of his favourite books and was struck by the way their worlds of the past seemed to reflect the "dismal chaos" of the world he was living in. He decided to keep a record of those moments by reading one favourite book every month for a year, and writing notes elicited by his reading.

The result is a curiously enchanting book, A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books. It is a book of fragments, but in an eerie way the fragments come together and hint at something momentous that lies just out of reach. It's also a wonderful reminder of why we read at all.

Much of this is due to the choice of books, which is somewhat eccentric. There are the classics that boys used to read - Kipling's Kim, Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau, Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four. There are classics of world literature - Don Quixote, Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. And then there are books of almost wilful obscurity, such as The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, that most English-speaking readers have never heard of. Read More

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Argentine Literature

Reading Others

Reading impressions on Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary at Entertaining Research.

A book certainly worth checking out; you might even buy yourself a copy, hunt down the books that Manguel notes in the diary, read them, and compare your reactions with that of his (provided you have enough time and inclination).

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Argentine Literature

A few extracts of reviews on Alberto Manguel's biographical novel depicting Robert Louis Stevenson's final days in Samoa.

Alberto Manguel, who evidently shares the enthusiasm for Robert Louis Stevenson of his friend Borges, has written this short tale of the RLS of the Samoa days. This is the very end, with Stevenson barely fit for firing off missives to the Times about Germans or any other nationality. Known as Tusitala, “the teller of tales”, Stevenson is a benign presence on the island. He defended the native people against the interests of colonialists and the more aggressive missionaries, as well as defending the reputation of Father Damien, “the leper priest of Molokai” from rivals from other denominations (although his defence would offend the pious Damien enthusiast as much as the attacks)

This novella - short story really - is a beguiling fiction weaved around those last days. Robert Louis Stevenson, wracked by the final stages of tuberculosis, filled with “nostalgia for places he had never been.” Mr Baker, a missionary, whose increasingly psychotic preachings resemble less and less the gospels and more and more a dark, genocidal vision of destruction, makes his appearance on the island. Repelled by his rhetoric, Stevenson is nevertheless beguiled by Baker’s accent, taking him back to the Edinburgh of his youth. Baker, however, has nothing but scorn for Tusitala, to the writer that: “you would be better employed reading to them from the Scriptures. That is the only truth.”
by Seamus Sweeney

Manguel's Stevenson went to Samoa to be able to breathe but is oppressed by a combination of status and inertia. He comes across Baker, a missionary from Edinburgh, who is delighted to meet Samoa's "chief celebrity", and they reminisce about Scotland while watching the sun go down. After this convivial start, the story becomes one of shadows: a girl whom Stevenson has publicly admired is raped and killed. His hat (a famous attribute) is found nearby.

Trapped heat suffuses everything: the movements of a crowd, which are "unpredictable and strong as a blaze"; the obscenely rotting papayas, the mouldering books and clothes, Stevenson's inexpressible desire, and the extreme red of the blood he coughs up, which is the same colour as the flower in the murdered girl's hair. Baker, who loathes the island's "poisonous brightness", proves to be a fanatic and a drunk. Stevenson is implicated by the evidence of people who swear that they saw him in places he couldn't have been - or could he? Rumours and accusations thicken the toxic atmosphere, and no one's version of events adds up.

This contrived fiction works well as a novella, a form which can bring out the artifice in a writer to remarkable, or rococo, effect. Here, plain speech bumps up against formal debate and undigested biographical matter, while people act according to the information they have to convey. Syntactical oddities make the book read at times as if it were in translation, but this adds to the general air of mediation.
from Telegraph.co.uk

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde in Bournemouth in 1885, and died in Samoa 10 years later. Alberto Manguel, of Argentinian descent, author of a notable History of Reading, has read into Stevenson's last days a gothic drama that places the writing of the novel at the end of his life, and makes use of the report that his wife Fanny caused him to burn his first draft on the grounds that it had made a story out of an allegory. Stevenson's second shot stresses the "thorough and primitive duality of man", the idea that every thinking fellow feels himself at times to be two fellows. Manguel's novella borrows from Stevenson's letters, from the expurgated edition of 1899: the story it tells is about the writer of the letters, but it could also be considered counterfactual. It seems to point a dualistic moral, and it bears a faint likeness to the stories of the Argentinian (and Stevensonian) allegorist, Borges.

Juxtaposing Jekyll with Stevenson's unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston, which he was writing at the time of his death, brings out a duality in his art. The first of these novels is in English. Parts of the second are in Scots. He was a writer who excelled when he turned to the language of his youth. A fair number of his critics miss the point, and lack feeling for the Scots tongue.

The exiled Stevenson was both a laird and a scarecrow. To protect his lungs he had cast himself away in the thick of a tropical rain forest. "We are a very crazy couple to lead so rough a life." But he wrote some of his very best and most Scottish things in a Samoa of tribal chiefs, diplomats, missionaries, servants, labourers, lotus-eaters. There he would sit lustrous-eyed, in his moustaches, playing his flageolet, a touching sight. Horrid Henry Adams, the American historian and snob, called him a filthy "bundle of sticks in a bag". But he also walked with kings, while the European powers quarrelled over the islands' natural resources. A relative of mine, a British colonial servant stationed in Fiji, saw him as "a meddling conceited fool, who thinks as a successful novelist he should be allowed to try to rule Samoa".
by Karl Miller, The Guardian

In this uncluttered novella illustrated by Stevenson's own woodcuts, I had the strange sensation of stumbling across an oasis in a desert of too many words. Reading felt as soothing as exhaling. Which is both ironic and to the point, given Manguel's subject matter: the final months of Stevenson's sickly life in Samoa, where he went to breathe more easily. Manguel prefaces his work with Goethe's caveat: "No one wanders under palm trees unpunished." When the author finds himself drawn to a young girl at a ceremony, he recalls St Augustine thanking God for "not making him responsible for his dreams". The girl is later found raped and murdered, with Stevenson's hat in the vicinity. The fiction of his mind finds increasingly alarming ways of crawling out. Far from Edinburgh Presbyterianism, in a land where "the stories you tell become part of reality", Manguel offers a terrifying defence for and indictment of the "claptrap of fiction".
by Sarah Adams, The Guardian

In Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, the Argentine literary critic Alberto Manguel (who describes readers as "post-mortem creators") resuscitates the Victorian author, creating a murder mystery based on his final days in Samoa. Much has been made of Stevenson's atheism (particularly in contrast with his father's Calvinism), and in this taut novella, the spiritual struggle comes to a head: Stevenson falls victim to a malady he could reasonably be credited with inventing—a split personality à la Jekyll and Hyde. "Open—brash, unhidden," he is haunted by a ghost-like missionary, "reserved, whispered, buttoned-up." When a young girl on the island is raped, the reader is not sure whether the writer did it, or the missionary, or whether—as Stevenson puts it in his 1886 classic—"these incongruous faggots were . . . bound together."
by Rachel Aviv, Village Voice

In the novella, the ailing Stevenson, out watching a beautiful island sunset, encounters a stranger, a Scottish missionary who straightaway announces his disgust with the easy morality and vices of the natives. A short time later, with that sudden compression that fables specialize in, the body of a beautiful young girl is found in the hills, and the author's hat is discovered nearby. There is just enough ambiguity -- abetted by Stevenson's delirious fevers -- to direct our thoughts to the theme of the double. As it turns out, Stevenson himself is involved with this theme in the work he is struggling with, a grim Scottish fantasia that bears a distinct resemblance to his famous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Manguel's spare storybook style keeps us from deeper engagement with the plot but serves him well at the end, when the suggestions and implications are most densely woven. Then he can create a sonorous cadence in keeping with the dark intention of this little work: "He tried not to think of what had happened. Here, in the green heat, that which was forbidden was not mentioned. Evil was tabu, unuttered, it was not given existence in words. On the stones of Edinburgh was written, in the Gothic script that had so delighted Sir Walter Scott in his youth, the Old Testament warning, Thou Shalt Not, so that during Stevenson's wanderings through the city his eye would always land, unbidden, on the outlawed temptations, the sins spelled out for all to know, offered as in a dark mirror even to those who had not yet conceived them, like an inverted pleasure." Though we do hear the Stevensonian echo throughout, only in these last pages does the note ring clear.
by Sven Birkerts, Washington Post

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Argentine Literature

Stan Persky reviews Alberto Manguel's "The Library at Night", John Sutherland's "How to Read a Novel" and Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer", three books on reading and readers.

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires, spent part of his childhood in Israel, wandered Europe in his youth and now resides in France. Yet he is, by his own assertion, a Canadian writer. It was after moving here in 1982 that Manguel first felt he lived “in a place where I could participate actively as a writer in the running of the state.”

Manguel’s significance, however, is hardly limited to his reflections on Canada. His essays, fiction and anthologies represent the worldliest of intellectual itineraries. The volumes on reading for which he’s famous—A History of Reading, Reading Pictures and, most recently, The Library at Night—are mosaics rich with anecdote, research, insight and an eloquently articulated passion for the fathomless role of books in our lives.

VUE WEEKLY: In The Library at Night you confess that as a youth you dreamed of being a librarian, but found this goal sabotaged by “sloth and an ill-restrained fondness for travel.” Had a writing career not yet occurred to you?

ALBERTO MANGUEL: No. I think it’s a reaction many readers have. You read great books, finding them such well-crafted, magical objects, worlds into which you enter, that the idea of creating something similar seems impossible. I didn’t know that every writer thinks this way. Writing eventually came to me by chance, from ideas sparked by reading. Even in my fiction, the starting point has something to do with reading.

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Argentine Literature

Book Review: With Borges by Alberto Manguel

Like the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Manguel's With Borges is almost perfect in its brevity (almost only because of the annoying typos and spelling mistakes). But, as with Borges, brevity in this case doesn't mean simplicity. In fewer than 100 narrow pages, many of them with Sara Facio's evocative photographs, Manguel manages to echo the complexity of his fellow Argentinean's labyrinthine tales, with their blending of fact and fiction, mysticism and mathematics. With Borges does not include fiction (although the conversations are based on memories of a time long past), but it does combine memoir, biography, and reflections on the works of Borges and of the writers he admired to create an intimate portrait of this enigmatic writer.

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Argentine Literature

With Borges by Alberto Manguel

An excerpt of Alberto Manguel's "With Borges" can be found here.

Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel

Review of Alberto Manguel's Reading Pictures

This book is in a line of works of eccentric scholarship: Pliny the Elder's Natural History (the founding work of the genre), Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature. In this kind of work, wide and eclectic reading is put at the service of a large thesis, one which is not so rigorous as to exclude the entertaining anecdote or the curious fact. (Manguel pays homage to his master Pliny in his chapter 'The Image as Witness'.) The book is thus midway between a treatise and a book of quotations. It is too personal, too idiosyncratic, to be either the one or the other.

You can find the full review here.

Argentinian Alberto Manguel is the author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, became a Canadian citizen in 1982, and now lives in France, where he was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. His most recent books are Stevenson Under the Palm Trees and A Reading Diary.

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London Times Books of the Year

From the selection made by the London Times writers:

Nadine Gordimer

Carlos Fuentes's This I Believe : A Life From A to Z. The work of a complete mind, emotions: the dazzling range of experience opened, questioning, exulting, believing, doubting. There is bountiful pleasure in being led by wonderful prose and effortless erudition from Christ to Kafka, Revolution to Sex, Time to Jealousy, Death to Urbanities, Children, Politics, Velázquez, Globalization. The philosophy? Best expressed by Fuentes himself: "Preserve and create are our rival verbs at the dawn of this new century".

You can find the full article here.

Alberto Manguel

The new novel by the Argentinian Eduardo Berti, Todos Los Funes, is a wonderfully funny, literate adventure story set in academia. An absent-minded professor named Funes discovers that an astonishing number of Latin American writers have chosen the name Funes for their protagonists (Borges, Bioy Casares, Roa Bastos, etc).

You can find the full article here.

Ian Michael

The major event on the Anglo-Spanish literary scene was the publication in New York of Fever and Spear (New Directions; Chatto in the UK), the first part of Javier Mari­as's tripledecker tour de force, Your Face Tomorrow, of which the second part, Baile y sueño (Dance and Dream), appeared in Madrid (Alfaguara) late last year.

You can find the full article here.