A Reader on Reading

In the thirty-second chapter of the first part of Don Quixote, the innkeeper, who has given the exhausted hero a bed for the night, argues with the priest about the merits of novels of chivalry, saying that he is unable to see how such books could make anyone lose his mind.

“I don’t know how that can be,” explains the innkeeper, “since, as I understand it, there’s no better reading in the world, and over there I have two or three of these novels, together with some other papers, which, I truly believe, have preserved not only my life but also that of many others; for in harvest time, a great number of reapers come here, and there’s always one who can read, and who takes one of these books in his hands, and more than thirty of us gather around him, and we sit there listening to him with such pleasure that it makes us all grow young again.”

The innkeeper himself favors battle scenes; a local whore prefers stories of romantic courtship; the innkeeper’s daughter likes best of all the lamentations of the knights when absent from their ladies. Each listener (each reader) translates the text into his or her own experience and desire, effectively taking possession of the story which, for the censoring priest, causes readers like Don Quixote to go mad, but which, according to Don Quixote himself, provides glowing examples of honest and just behavior in the real world. One text, a multiplicity of readings, a shelfful of books derived from that one text read out loud, increasing at each turned page our hungry libraries, if not always those of paper, certainly those of the mind: that too has been my happy experience.

I am deeply grateful to my Don Quixote. Over the two hospital weeks, the twin volumes kept vigil with me: they talked to me when I wanted entertainment, or waited quietly, attentively, by my bed. They never became impatient with me, neither sententious nor condescending. They continued a conversation begun ages ago, when I was someone else, as if they were indifferent to time, as if taking for granted that this moment too would pass, and their reader’s discomfort and anxiety, and that only their remembered pages would remain on my shelves, describing something of my own, intimate and dark, for which as yet I had no words.

Sources

“I know that!” Alice cried eagerly. “You take some

flour-”

“Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen

asked.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 9

The pieces collected in this book have appeared, in a different form, in a number of publications, or were delivered as lectures, as follows:

“A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood”: Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood (Toronto: Knopf, 1998)

“Room for the Shadow”: Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life, ed. Constance Rooke (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006)

“On Being Jewish”: Published as “A Lost Sense of Belonging in No Man’s Land,” The Independent (London), 18 September 1994

“Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest”: Foreword to Meanwhile, In Another Part of the Forest: Gay Stories from Alice Munro to Yukio Mishima, ed. Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson (Toronto: Knopf, 1993)

“The Further off from England”: Bad Trips, ed. Keith Fraser (New York: Vintage, 1991)

“Homage to Proteus”: Lecture, Passa Porta Festival, Brussels, 26–29 March 2009

“Borges in Love”: Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood (Toronto: Knopf, 1998)

“Borges and the Longed-For Jew”: Published as “Borges and the Jews,” The Jewish Chronicle (London), 9 February 2007, Literary Supplement

“Faking It”: Published as “Contributing Editor’s Column,” Descant 140 / Improvisations (Toronto), vol. 39, no. 1 (Spring 2008)

“The Death of Che Guevara”: Published as “Hero of Our Time,” Times Literary Supplement, 2 May 1997

“The Blind Bookkeeper”: Delivered as the Northrop Frye/Antonine Maillet Lecture, Moncton, New Brunswick, 26 April 2008

“The Perseverance of Truth”: Hrant Dink Lecture, University of Ankara, 6 March 2009

“AIDS and the Poet”: PEN International lecture, London, 1997

“The Full Stop”: New York Times, 18 April 1999

“In Praise of Words”: The Spectator (London), 10 March 2001

“A Brief History of the Page”: Conference paper, The Future of the Page, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 20 June 2000

“The Voice That Says ‘I’”: Lecture, Turin Book Fair, 18–19 May 2009

“Final Answers”: Published in French as an introduction to the Opera du Rhin, Strasbourg, 2006 season, Autumn 2006

“What Song the Sirens Sang”: Conference paper, Dante’s Women, Ravenna, September 2008