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

Ildefonso Falcones: Cathedral of the Sea

Tom Gaisford reviews Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea.

Cathedral of the Sea is as sculpted and fluid a tale as the image conjured up by its picturesque title. Originally written in Spanish, the international bestseller appears now in an impressively graceful translation which captures beautifully the archaic and lyrical tone of the narrative. Drawing on the chronicle of Pedro III, Ildefonso Falcones's first and lengthy novel steals us away into darkest 14th- century feudal Catalonia, a period defined by serfdom and subjugation, by iniquitous laws and by their brutal enforcement.

Because of his relative wealth, the peasant farmer Bernat Estanyol almost succeeds in breaking this mould. However, while celebrating his wedding day in the late September sun, the appearance of three men on horseback and their retinue signals a rapid end to any such aspiration. Exercising his feudal rights, Llorenc de Bellera, the Lord of Navarcles, whisks Bernat's new bride upstairs and rapes her. In order to pre-empt responsibility for "any future bastards", Navarcles then forces the groom himself to repeat the act on pain of being flayed alive.

Within a year of this opening act of savagery, in which our hero, Arnau, is conceived, he and his mother are abducted by Navacles' men. The grim cruelty of this young family's situation is set against a sense of timeless oppression, so systemic that it verges on the mundane: "Bernat peered at the cloud of dust trailing off towards the horizon, and then looked over at the two oxen, stolidly chewing on the ears of corn they had been trampling over and over." In this way Falcones draws a parallel between the plight of the peasant community and the corn on which all elements of society depend: both serve merely to be crushed and exploited.

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Spanish Literature

Albert Sánchez Piñol: Pandora in the Congo

Christian House reviews Albert Sánchez Piñol's Pandora in the Congo.

It's no surprise that in these confused metro-sexual times a resistant force should be celebrating the kind of manly yarns mastered by Victorian and Edwardian popular novelists. The fatalistic trajectories of military endeavours and grand expeditions have gripped a new brace of writers. The late, lamented George MacDonald Fraser may have headed off to the great barracks in the sky but plenty, from Mark Gatiss to James Delingpole, have picked up the regimental colours and stood their ground. It's back to the days of mutton-chop whiskers and billiard-room brawls, when men were men and women learnt needlepoint.

Front of ranks is Albert Sánchez Piñol whose wonderfully spooky debut novel Cold Skin was an icy tour de force. For his follow up, Pandora in the Congo, he shifts his focus from the Antarctic wastelands to the jungles of central Africa; the action playing out as the world caves in to the madness of the Great War.

Marcus Garvey (not the Marcus Garvey, Piñol likes to play around with famous names) is the half-Balkan, half-English manservant attending William and Richard Craver. The Cravers are the spoilt, malevolent offspring of one of the army's greatest heroes. They aimlessly lounge in the shadow of their father's fame until William, the cleverer and more callous of the pair, devises a plan to mine the undiscovered depths of the Congo. Marcus is cajoled into helping them through the inner capillaries of the heart of darkness, all the way "to a latitude empty of men".

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Spanish 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

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Sophie Gorman reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

Isabel Allende is one of the best-known Latin American novelists (her most famous book The House of the Spirits was a huge international bestseller) who writes in the magic realism tradition. She is part of the Allende family from Chile, which included President Allende, but has lived for years in the US with her extended family. She now has more than a dozen novels to her name but a personal tragedy was the basis for one of her most moving books.

In December 1991, Allende's 26-year-old daughter Paula suddenly fell grievously ill and sank into a coma from which she would never wake up. Devastated as she watched her daughter die, Allende turned to storytelling as a portal to connect her to Paula and as a method to sustain her own dwindling spirit.

The result was Paula, a book of two parts; the first written during the endless hours spent roaming hospital corridors, and the second a few years later when Allende was able to step back to look at her own life, the history of her family and her country, Chile. And Allende's need to sustain her spirit and distract her grief through storytelling has led now to The Sum of Our Days, the latest part of a memoir that began with Paula.

This most personal story is, superficially at least, written as a letter to her dead daughter. It begins with a description of the family gathering to scatter Paula's ashes in a park near Allende's Californian home, where her daughter used to go on romantic walks with her husband, Ernesto.

From this jumping-off point, Allende describes all that has happened since and how life has kept going, almost despite itself. A matriarch to her extending and intricate family, Allende is also someone who experiences life more richly than most, with her every experience overflowing with emotion.

Even her dreams are psychedelic kaleidoscopes and she believes them to give true meaning to her waking life. And she carries her passionate Chilean ideas and ideals of family as a tribe with her wherever she lives.

In this book, vivid descriptions of her husband, children and friends, or her "clan" as she refers to them, are laced with a real sense of honesty and, as she turns her writer's eye inwards on herself too, she certainly doesn't shy away from baring all her own flaws. Alongside the many fights and reconciliations within her extended family that are part of her daily life, she also highlights her tantrums, her see-sawing mood swings and her inability to resist any opportunity to meddle in the tangled lives around her.

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Chilean 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