ENDPAPER
Master of bibliophilic revel
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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A chance encounter with a genius led to the emergence of an eloquent and witty bookman: Alberto Manguel.
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One afternoon, in 1964, a blind man walked up to a 16-year-old working in a quaint Argentinean bookstore and asked if the lad would be interested in a part-time job reading to him in the evenings. This is how Alberto Manguel met Jorge Luis Borges, and from this chance encounter emerged the century’s most intelligent, eloquent and witty bookman.
Manguel is a magnificent, impassioned reader among bibliophiles. His erudition and scholarship are unorthodox, eccentric and capacious. There’s poetry and wit to his writing — unusual in bookmen who mostly chronicle or report. His books are steeped in breathtaking anecdotes and strike-you-dead aphorisms, like this one by Beckett: “To restore silence is the role of objects.” The Scotland on Sunday said: “Alberto Manguel is to reading what Casanova was to sex.”
Imagine now that the library is closing, the doors have been locked, and the lights go out. Somewhere else, in a house (in many houses) someone puts a book that she was reading back on to her bookshelf, and turns out the light, leaving the room. Now, what do you think the books do once they are alone? In The Library at Night, Manguel imagines them slowly settling down for the night — to converse, make love, breed more books, even do battle with each other.
“During the day, the library is a realm of order,” he observes. “The library at night seems to rejoice in the world’s essential, joyful muddle.” His celebrated A History of Reading (1996) is a classic in the genre of books on books. Here he devotes an entire chapter called ‘The Book Fool’ to the different kinds of spectacles worn (and looks sported) by bookworms through the ages.
Familiar ritual
He even describes the familiar ritual: “pulling the glasses out of a case, cleaning them with a cloth, perching them on the nose and steadying them behind the ears before peering at the now lucid page held in front of us. Then pushing them or sliding them down the glistening bridge of the nose in order to bring the letters into focus, and after a while, lifting them off and rubbing the skin between the eyebrows, screwing the eyelids shut to keep out the siren text. And the final act: taking them off, folding them and inserting them between the pages of the book to mark the place where we left off reading for the night.”
In 2006, he published a slim memoir called With Borges that lovingly recounts for us that brief time he spent reading to that enigmatic Argentinean literary genius. For several years, the bookstore clerk would turn up promptly at Borges’ apartment at Maipu 994 and read the book the blind writer had chosen for that evening. Manguel would also take dictation, mostly Borges’ poetry, which he would call out with punctuation in place.
In his new book, The Library at Night, Manguel notes that “libraries have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” The idea for this book came when he was creating a vast library for himself in a 15th century home he had bought recently in France.
His starting point for the book became his childhood library. Beginning his tour there, he takes us deep into book-lined labyrinths (with striking images and photographs) old and new: from the vanished Alexandrian library to Google. In between we learn of the personal libraries of Borges and Dickens, of an Afghani bookseller who kept his store open even during the war, and the imaginary library of Count Dracula. Most nights Manguel sits in this newly constructed library which he calls a ‘shapeless universe’, warmed by all the lamp lights spilling on his books and around him, breathing in the smell of the “musky perfume of the leather bindings’.
Before he built this library, his apartment in Toronto had virtually become a gigantic warehouse with books crammed in bedrooms, bathrooms and even the staircases, leaving his children amused and exasperated that “they required a library card to enter their own home”. Talking about the worldwide library, Manguel perceptively observes that the Internet has changed the library that contained everything to the library that contains anything. He values a sense the sense of a library or collection with a defined space, a personal focus.
Early life
Manguel was born in Buenos Aires in 1948, and went to school there. Disillusioned very early by academic life, he never went to university, preferring to teach himself by reading prodigiously. His father was the ambassador to Israel when Manguel was growing up, and he was partly raised there. In 1984 he adopted Canada as his country and, for the first time, could see himself as a writer there. He is a gifted essayist, anthologist, translator and novelist. His little known Stevenson Under the Palm Tress is a delectable little murder mystery featuring Robert Louis Stevenson — one of his all time favourite writers. The book is accompanied by Stevenson’s own woodcuts.
Bride of Frankenstein is an engaging piece of film criticism; Into the Looking Glass Wood is a fine collection of essays; A Reading Diary, which is exactly that; a diary. God’s Spies: Stories in Defiance of Oppression is an unusual anthology and Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate is art criticism at its most unconventional and invigorating. This list hardly exhausts his work; there are several more that I haven’t mentioned.
“For the cosmopolitan reader,” writes Manguel, “a homeland is not in space, fractured by political frontiers, but in time, which has no borders.” Elsewhere in an interview he said, “I wouldn’t define myself as a writer. I would define myself as a reader.” It is because he sees himself this way that he is our master of bibliophilic revel.
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