Witty world of a bookman

Second Take

To the delight of desi book lovers, Alberto Manguel — that book-eater, that reading bibliomaniac, that master of bibliophilic revels — was in India early this year. His new book, Curiosity, an exploration of how curiosity works, could well be the first non-bibliophilic-themed book he’s written.

My favourite Manguel book is a little-known memoir of a brief time he spent with Jorge Luis Borges, reading aloud to the writer. Called simply With Borges, it deserves to be known more widely. Published in 2006, it affectionately recounts his days spent reading to that enigmatic Argentinian literary genius. Manguel was working as a bookshop clerk in Buenos Aires, and it was on an afternoon in 1964 that the blind Borges walked into this bookstore and asked if the young clerk  would read to him.

For several years the bookstore clerk would turn up promptly at Borges’s apartment at Maipu 994, and read the book the blind writer had chosen for that evening. Manguel would also take dictation, mostly Borges’s poetry, which he would call out with punctuation in place.

My other favourite Manguel book is The Library at Night, in which the author asks us to imagine the books in this imaginary library, slowly settling down for the night — to converse, make love, breed more books and even to battle with each other. 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 to her bookshelf, and turns out the light, leaving the room. Now, what do you think the books do once they are alone? “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.” The idea for this book came to him when he was creating a vast library for himself in a 15th-century home he had bought 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): 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. On 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 bedrooms, bathrooms and even the staircases crammed with books, 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 the sense of a library or collection with a defined space, a personal focus. What you exclude from a library is just as important as what you include.

For me, Manguel is a magnificent and an 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.”

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. He adopted Canada as his country in 1984, 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 Trees 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.

His celebrated A History of Reading is a classic in the genre of books on books.
He devotes an entire chapter called The Book Fool to the different kinds of spectacles worn (and looks sported) by bookworms through the ages.

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.”