![]() He is rehearsing a familiar list of his childhood reading when he arrives at HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, “which my friend Lenny Fagin gave me for my 10th birthday”. “My story remains elusive because it is never the definitive story,” he tells us, and in one curious anecdote this turns out to be true. Jorge Luis Borges at his house in Buenos Aires, 1977. Where does this leave Manguel, who has constructed his own autobiography through successive accounts of his reading life? The son of a diplomat, his childhood was itinerant, and his passion for books was informed and encouraged by reading aloud to the blind Jorge Luis Borges after emigrating to Canada and later to France and the US, he has now found his way back to Argentina as director of the national library (a job once held by Borges himself). All libraries are the glorious record of that failure.” Yet, in another digression, he points out that “every book confesses the impossibility of holding fully on to whatever it is that our experience seizes. For Manguel libraries are not simply repositories of learning but nerve centres of civilisation, where the conscious and the subconscious outpourings of centuries teem together in a platonic mirror of life that may also, paradoxically, be humanity’s fullest iteration of itself. ![]() They include a philosopher of a faith that was not Mendoza’s own (Erasmus), poets in tongues other than Spanish (Petrarch and Virgil) and a fellow explorer from another age and another culture – a 13th-century Franciscan monk whose travels produced a history of the Mongol people. The books in this founding library, Manguel writes, communicate an eclectic, generous conception (probably unconscious, certainly not explicit) of what a new city should be. In one, he recalls the syphilitic knight Pedro de Mendoza, who sailed to South America in 1536 under instructions from the emperor Charles I to set up a Spanish colony, taking with him not only 13 ships and 2,000 men, but “seven volumes of medium size bound in black leather” which were to become the continent’s first library. The form Manguel has chosen is an essay interrupted by 10 “digressions”, which ramble anecdotally across time and space. This nightmare, like Stevenson’s, has produced a book – a slim, fragmentary meditation on the power of reading and the importance of libraries. It is like playing a film backwards, consigning visible narratives and methodological reality to the regions of the distant and unseen, a voluntary forgetting.” ![]() “Packing,” he writes, “is an exercise in oblivion. That meant packing up his precious library of 35,000 books in the knowledge that he might never see them all together again. ![]() One of the world’s great readers, whose finest work has been about the writing of others, Manguel faced his own worst nightmare three years ago when – defeated by “sordid” French bureaucracy – he and his partner left the medieval village presbytery that had been their home for the last 15 years for a tiny flat in Manhattan. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |