A Reader on Reading

Alberto Manguel

A Reader

on Reading

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew

Memorial Fund.

Copyright © 2010 Alberto Manguel.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,

including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying

permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright

Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without

written permission from the publishers.

Designed by Sonia Shannon

Set in Fournier type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Manguel, Alberto.

A reader on reading / Alberto Manguel.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-15982-0 (alk. paper)

1. Books and reading. 2. Manguel, Alberto—

Books and reading. I. Title.

z1003.M2925 2010

028’.9—dc22

2009043719

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-

1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Mavis Gallant,

always in search of the evidence.

“Give your evidence,” said the King; “and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 11

Contents

Preface

I. WHO AM I?

A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood

Room for the Shadow

On Being Jewish

Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest

The Further off from England

Homage to Proteus

II. THE LESSON OF THE MASTER

Borges in Love

Borges and the Longed-For Jew

Faking It

III. MEMORANDA

The Death of Che Guevara

The Blind Bookkeeper

The Perseverance of Truth

AIDS and the Poet

IV. WORDPLAY

The Full Stop

In Praise of Words

A Brief History of the Page

The Voice That Says “I”

Final Answers

What Song the Sirens Sang

V. THE IDEAL READER

Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader

How Pinocchio Learned to Read

Candide in Sanssouci

The Gates of Paradise

Time and the Doleful Knight

Saint Augustine’s Computer

VI. BOOKS AS BUSINESS

Reading White for Black

The Secret Sharer

Honoring Enoch Soames

Jonah and the Whale

The Legend of the Dodos

VII. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

In Memoriam

God’s Spies

Once Again, Troy

Art and Blasphemy

At the Mad Hatter’s Table

VIII. THE NUMINOUS LIBRARY

Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Library

The Library of the Wandering Jew

The Library as Home

The End of Reading

Sources

Index

Preface

“You ought to return thanks in a neat speech,” the Red Queen said,

frowning at Alice as she spoke.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 9

THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK, as of almost all my other books, is reading, that most human of creative activities. I believe that we are, at the core, reading animals and that the art of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything: in the landscape, in the skies, in the faces of others, and, of course, in the images and words that our species creates. We read our own lives and those of others, we read the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, we read pictures and buildings, we read that which lies between the covers of a book.

This last is of the essence. For me, words on a page give the world coherence. When the inhabitants of Macondo were afflicted with an amnesia-like sickness which came to them one day during their hundred years of solitude, they realized that their knowledge of the world was quickly disappearing and that they might forget what a cow was, what a tree was, what a house was. The antidote, they discovered, lay in words. To remember what their world meant to them, they wrote out labels and hung them from beasts and objects: “This is a tree,” “This is a house,” “This is a cow, and from it you get milk, which mixed with coffee gives you café con leche.” Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be.

“Believe to be”: therein lies the challenge. Pairing words with experience and experience with words, we, readers, sift through stories that echo or prepare us for an experience, or tell us of experiences that will never be ours, as we know all too well, except on the burning page. Accordingly, what we believe a book to be reshapes itself with every reading. Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library; my words and my world — except for a few constant landmarks — are never one and the same. Heraclitus’s bon mot about time applies equally well to my reading: “You never dip into the same book twice.”