Photography: Premio Nonino
Author: Velimir Cindrić
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In the year of 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote a short and now acclaimed essay on the relationship between readers and their books of choice, and titled it “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting.”
While preparing to leave his country home in the Loire Valley in June 2015, the famous Argentinian writer and bibliophile Alberto Manguel embarked on a path seemingly opposite to Benjamin’s: he had to pack up more than 35,000 volumes he had collected throughout his life and ship them to a new overseas address – for Habent sua fata libelli – books have their own destiny.
As he was packing and sorting through books in order to decide which ones he was going to keep and store, and with which ones he would part, Manguel took a bite of Eve’s apple and started chewing on the nature of the relationship between the book and the reader, order and chaos, reading and remembering, producing an elegy that reads like a manifesto, a lucid act of rebellion against the threat of oblivion hanging over our shelves so as to deplete their content as well as our memory.
These are the words that describe the book “Packing My Library” (Fraktura), written by the Argentinian-Canadian writer Albert Manguel, which the Financial Times lauded as “an ode to reading,” while The Guardian dubbed Manguel “a Don Juan of libraries.”
For his stellar books, Manguel has received numerous prestigious international awards, including Fellow of the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Medalla al Mérito, Prix Formentor, and Gutenberg Prize. The high, wide, and handsome work of this brilliant author, who is distinguished by erudition and wisdom, and above all a burning passion for literature, did not fly under the radar of the jury of the literary Nonino Prize, which awarded him this eminent prize in the international category at the end of January.
That is a pretty big deal, considering that the Nonino Prize is regarded as a precursor to sealing the deal with the illustrious Nobel Prize. You see, since 2000, as many as six winners of the Nonino Award have subsequently crowned their career with the Nobel Prize! The Nonino Prize is also special in that its sponsor is not, as is usually the case, an academic or philanthropic institution, but the world-famous grappa producer Nonino, a brand with a presence in more than 70 countries, including Croatia.
Alberto Manguel was born in 1948 in Buenos Aires. He grew up in Tel Aviv and lived in Italy, France, Tahiti, England, and Canada. From 1964 to 1968, while he worked at the Pygmalion bookstore in Buenos Aires, he had the privilege of reading literary works to none other than the legendary Jorge Luis Borges, who had already gone blind by that time. Years later, he portrayed the enigmatic genius in his book titled “With Borges” (2004), for which he was awarded the Prix du livre en Poitou-Charentes.
In 1969, Manguel left Argentina and went to Europe, where he worked as a translator and editor for various publishing houses. Manguel is the author of numerous works of non-fiction, including “The Dictionary of Imaginary Places” (a catalogue of fantasy lands, islands, cities, and other locations from world literature, co-authored with Gianni Guadalupi, 1980), “A History of Reading” (1996), “The Library at Night” (2007), “Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography” (2008), “A Reader on Reading” (2010), “The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor” (2013) and “Curiosity” (2015). He has also authored five novels, with special mention to “News from A Foreign Country Came” (1991), “Stevenson Under the Palm Trees” (2003), and “All Men Are Liars” (2008), as well as plenty page-one anthologies.
We had a chat with Alberto Maguela in Udine, Italy, the day before he was presented with this prominent award at the Nonino Prize ceremony.
As an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and director of a national library, do you see yourself as a person with multiple identities?
Yes, and no. You know, there’s only one true identity in my book, and that’s that of a reader. But what does it mean to be a reader? It means to be countless people all at once. It means being Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, Dante, King Lear, Pinocchio… These are the identities I acknowledge.
You were born into a Jewish family, and you spent the first seven years of your life in Israel. Do you remember anything from that period, and did it shape the person you’ve become?
Yes, but you must know that I didn’t spend those years there as a Jew. After I was born, my father was appointed ambassador to Israel. Growing up in Israel for the first seven years of my life, I was unaware of my Jewish heritage due to the prevalence of Roman Catholicism as the state religion in Argentina. My family celebrated Christmas and Easter; I knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart, along with many other things and customs related to the Roman Catholic faith, but I knew nothing about Judaism, and I didn’t learn a single word of Hebrew during my stay there. It wasn’t until we returned to Argentina that I found out that my family is actually Jewish.
And as for my childhood in Israel, I remember a lot. I lived with my parents in the embassy building, but I was actually raised by my nanny, a Czech woman, who spoke English and German. She taught me these two languages. I didn’t speak Spanish with my parents until we returned to Argentina, so the central figure in my life during those seven years was this woman who taught me to read and introduced me to the world of books. She also took me on excursions, so I have fond memories of the Israeli scenery, a large park near the sea, as well as some other places I visited with her.
But I didn’t go to school there and I didn’t have friends my age. Thus, for those seven years, my whole world revolved around my relationship with my nanny and my books.
Has living in Argentina, Israel, Italy, France, Tahiti, England, and Canada made you a cosmopolitan, or do you feel a strong sense of belonging to one or more of these countries?
I felt a strong connection to many of the places I called home. Argentina, where I spent my adolescent years, has to be at the top of the list, mostly due to the wonderful times at this amazing University-run school in Buenos Aires. We weren’t taught the usual high school subjects, but lectures by university professors. However, even my golden years at this “argentum” school have proven that there is no silver without its dross. The dross was that there was no curriculum, and the silver lining was that these professors were highly specialised in their respective fields. You see, if you study just one thing in depth, your stimulated brain waves are bound to brush with the vast ocean of knowledge of the rest of the world. If you throw a stone into the water, you may have previously studied that stone, but the ripples it has caused will keep expanding along with your knowledge. However, Argentina later went to shambles, first with Peron, the dictatorship, the military government… and it hasn’t been the same since.
After that, I fell in love with French culture, and my next affair was with Canada. Living in Canada opened my eyes to what real democracy looks like. And now I’m head over heels with Portugal, where I’ve lived for the last three years. I donated my library of 45,000 books to the city of Lisbon, and they created an entire cultural centre around it called Espaço Atlântida, of which I am the director.
Just like Canada, Portugal is a proper democratic country. In this world, where fascism is rearing its ugly head everywhere, and where Trump and many other dictators can come into a position of power again, Portugal still holds on to democracy.
All your biographies contain an anecdote from your teenage years, dating from the mid-60s, when you worked at the Pygmalion bookstore in Buenos Aires and met Jorge Luis Borges. How did that encounter affect you?
When something happens to us, we usually come to understand what it means much later. As a teenager, I just wanted to work so I could have money to buy books. So, I got a job at that bookstore, where it turned out Borges was a customer, and I worked shifts before and after school. I knew he was an esteemed writer because we learned about him at school, but to me, he was mostly just a blind old man. And when he asked me to help him out, I agreed with the arrogance of a teenager, thinking – ok, I’ll help out that blind old man.
Borges lived in a small apartment with his mother, and I would go there in the evenings. We never made small talk – as soon as I’d enter the door, he’d say, for example, “let’s read Kipling today.” It was only later that I realised that Borges actually gave me a stamp of approval, telling me, in his own way, that what I loved had value. You see, I have loved books and reading all my life. If someone told me not to write anymore, I would’ve been fine with that. But if they said I couldn’t read anymore, that would’ve been the death of me.
Borges taught me the freedom of reading, meaning that you should not hold specific literary schools in reverence and be a pious student of the history of literature, but rather follow your own taste. You should educate yourself, of course, but if, say, you don’t like Shakespeare, that’s totally fine. It’s not necessary to follow any rules – it’s better to set your own.
That high-mindedness stayed with me all my life. So today, when I come across a book to which everyone sings the praises, but I don’t like it, I know that I don’t have to be in tune with them. Borges said that if you don’t like a book after reading the first two or three pages, lay it aside, even if it’s a classic. Books have an immense capacity for patience, and they’ll wait for you until you’re ready to read them. Maybe you’ll come back to their pages when you turn a completely new leaf. What Heraclitus said is also interesting: no man ever reads the same book twice!
Years later, you portrayed Borges in your book “With Borges”. Are your memories of him still vivid or has that book been romanticised in any way?
When I started working on that book, I had to tap into my teenage memories of that man. I had to put myself in the several sizes smaller shoes of the person I was back then, many years ago. As it goes with memory, one never remembers a specific moment. One remembers what they actually think they remember about that moment. One remembers the memory of the memory of that moment.
Each memory is but the top layer of a whole series of recollections. I’d compare it to archaeological excavation. And one can never get to the lowermost layer. Therefore, I can only say that these memories are real just as far as I know.
Care to describe yourself in 1969, when you toured throughout Europe and worked as a first reader for various publishing houses?
I was an inexperienced, wide-eyed 20-year-old looking for adventure. Nowadays, when talking to young people, among others my granddaughters, I tell them that if they want to know something about my youth, they have to picture a very, very different world from the one we live in today. My parents witnessed the end of World War II, and I grew up in the 50s and 60s, believing in a brave new world in which there would be no more great wars. I was convinced everything was possible, that the world was my oyster, containing a sea of possibilities I could easily navigate. The world didn’t seem like a dangerous place back then, so when I got to Europe, I hitchhiked wherever I went. Today, if my granddaughters were to tell me that they intend on hitchhiking, I’d be terrified for them. But yeah, back in my day, the world was completely different, and I discovered it with different eyes. And I was lucky.
Yes, I’ve always been lucky, and life has generally dealt me a very good hand. But I wouldn’t want to be a young person in today’s world.
You lived and worked in Tahiti on two occasions. What impression did that completely different world leave on you?
I ended up in Tahiti by chance, as is often the case. Before that, I lived in Milan, and I worked for the book editor Franco Maria Ricci. I had just gotten married. Ricci then sent me to Paris to set up his bookstore there, although I wasn’t too thrilled with the job. One day, a man walked in to buy some books. He told me that he owned a bookstore in Tahiti, that he was looking for someone to work there, and invited me to lunch. That evening, I came home and told my wife we were moving to Tahiti!
I worked there as a publisher. The experience was out of this continent and out of this world, but not in the way one would think at first. You see, most Europeans consider Tahiti to be a vacation spot. However, if you want to live there, you must know that everything is imported, and it breaks the bank. In addition, you have to get used to the hot and humid climate, which I didn’t warm up to. However, you get to know the other side of the tropics, its beautiful scenery, and its wonderful people.
For me, being so immersed in European culture, I had a case of mal du pays and mal itself. You know, all great European literature – from “King Lear” and “The Divine Comedy” to Henry James – is rooted in suffering, in the sense of the sorrows of young Werther. Polynesian culture may not be based on pure happiness, but it is not concerned with metaphysical conundra – it revolves around the pleasure of living in the moment and sensuality. My spirit did not aspire to that.
Be that as it may, my daughters were raised in Tahiti with a great sense of freedom; they went to school on the beach, under the palm trees. When we moved from Tahiti to Canada, it was winter, and they simply couldn’t get used to wearing shoes because they had never worn them in their life. So, the whole Tahiti experience was quite interesting. For example, we published Robert Louis Stevenson’s books in Tahitian… But for me personally, it was very difficult.
What did you like about Canada so much that you decided to settle there and become a citizen?
Even before going to Tahiti, my book called “The Dictionary of Imaginary Places” was published in Canada, and the anthologies I wrote in Tahiti were also published there. But I had never gone there myself and I knew nothing about that country. At one point, it occurred to me that Canada could provide me with the opportunity to work independently since my books were such a success there.
So, I hit town in this country of promise with my ex-wife, two daughters, and a newborn son. At first, it was toilsome because we were barely making ends meet. But we arrived at the right moment. Back then, Canada was a very affluent country that prioritized cultural development. I found out that I could get a scholarship if I wanted to write a play, or something for television… and along the way, I also discovered a sense of democracy.
You know, all three of my children, who were raised and educated in Canada, are now people without almost any prejudice. A Canadian education instilled a sense of honesty and social responsibility in them, something that has almost completely disappeared off the face of the Earth, especially from its cheeky US corner.
You have authored numerous non-fiction books and novels. How different are these two literary forms?
Like night and day. The similarity is that both my essays and novels arise from my questioning of reality. In order to write an essay, I previously have to study a lot of facts at the library, which I really like. When it comes to novels, I have to invent these facts and study them afterwards. The latter appears much more difficult to me – because no matter what you think about the world, it always has certain rules, even in chaos.
But when you have to bring a whole new parallel world to life in order to write a novel, you are bound to make mistakes, because all these new facts cause confusion, so you have to shape them into something coherent before you start writing.
What is the role of books in your personal life?
Books are my way of communicating with the world. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve judged the book of life not by its corporeal covers but by its ethereal pages. At the age of three or four, I discovered reading and, by extension, adventure, death, love–everything I came across in the stories I read. But I experienced the real magic much later in life. I fell in love, and I suddenly had the words to describe exactly what was happening to me–the words bestowed upon me by Keats, Dante, etc.
There have been very few instances in my life when books couldn’t match my real-life experiences. One, for example, was the birth of my children.
And what do you think of books as the primary source of knowledge in the era of digitalisation?
I’m not really hooked on digital reading. I come from another time. I do understand that there are people for whom electronic reading media are just what the doctor ordered. I gave it a try on several occasions, but it simply doesn’t work for me. I don’t trust that media; I have a disdain for the abhorrent techno-bureaucracy that comes with using an electronic device, even when I use my computer as a typewriter. I hate being dependent on the design and technological changes that Apple and Microsoft are introducing round the clock, as well as the fact that I have to make purchases all the time.
I miss the feeling when I was a kid and I’d pick up a piece of paper and a pen without having to wait for them to load or update… Back then, I could just do whatever I wanted the moment I wanted to do it. The issue with today’s technology is that, as is the case with all bureaucracies, it creates jobs for bureaucrats. But a far more serious issue is that the electronic media have contributed to the rise of fascism to a great extent because you depend on others to tell you what to do, to give you permission to do what you want.
What do you think the future holds for the process of reading?
I think things are going to be exactly as they are today. Look, reading hasn’t changed in the last five thousand years. What has changed is the medium of the text – stone, clay tablet, papyrus, printed paper, screen… but the process of reading itself has stayed the same. Reading, among other things, is our way of communicating with the dead, allowing us to share experiences that may not be ours at all, but are, nevertheless, the experiences of our kind.
However, because electronic technology constantly makes us relearn processes, it pushes us into an eternal present, which is the mediaeval definition of hell. There’s no past and no future—we are condemned to the eternal here and now, which actually doesn’t exist because time is always flowing. And that is extremely harmful for the development of free thought.
Do you feel a difference when you’re reading a paperback/hardcover as opposed to an e-book?
Absolutely. It’s a matter of neuroscience. I’m not a neurologist, but there is an expert on this, Maryanne Wolf, a scientist who wrote a book on reading on screen vs. reading in print, outlining the differences in which these two variations of the same process affect the brain. The neural activity in these two cases turned out to be very complex and disparate. She observed that younger generations have become used to almost exclusively reading on screen, leading to a significant drop in some very important cognitive skills, such as memory.
At which points are the writer, the reader and the world reflected in the very act of reading?
When the writer is done with the text, they will read it. However, once the whole process is over, the writer exits stage left, the very one they created, and no longer has control over the narrative. The text remains in a sort of limbo, until the reader redeems it and breathes new life into it. After that, the text becomes the responsibility of the reader.
According to Umberto Eco, there are limits to the interpretation of a text, but these limits are very wide. The reader can turn a text into something the writer could not even dream of.
What’s the charm in having a personal library, and does it have anything to do with the passion for book collecting?
Yes, and no. Look, there is no direct link between owning books and being an avid reader. Borges, for instance, was not the least bit interested in owning physical copies of books and was always handing them out. He had about 500–600 books at home. But me, I’m a bookworm with a genuine fetish for books. I love the feeling of a physical book under my fingers and my gaze, and every little aspect of a specific copy. The fact that I, for example, have a book that belonged to Robert Louis Stevenson is nothing short of magical to me.
Furthermore, I like the concept of a library; I love basking in its ambience, much as other people enjoy spending time in bars or other places to their liking. For me, being at the library means further expanding the space that I love. It’s a quirk that I really can’t logically explain; I can enjoy the book even if I give it away after reading it and never laying my eyes on it again.
To put it simply, I love the presence of books. When I’m at the library, I have the feeling that the books are talking to me, that we’re conversing… These are uncharted waters of my brain waves; it’s a qualia I strongly feel, but cannot convey to others.
As someone who has read almost every book there is, why do you keep coming back to “Alice in Wonderland”?
I think that every reader has books that feel almost autobiographical to them, in which they find crystal clear reflections of their own experiences, as I do through the looking glass since I found it in “Alice in Wonderland”. There are others, such as “The Divine Comedy”, but each contains different multitudes of my being at a different level. Nevertheless, it always comes down to exploring another world, or even several of them, in which the rules are different from the ones you have lived by until that moment.
Throughout my entire life, I saw my own reflection in “Alice”, regardless of whether I was a rebellious adolescent in an absurd world of adults or someone who believes that society in an unjust world should be just.
What are you reading these days?
I always read multiple things at once. At the moment, I’m reading Roberto Calasso’s book about animals in Kafka’s works, along with a wonderful, intricate book about the relationship between Borges, Einstein, Kant, and Heisenberg and the nature of reality. It’s called “The Rigor of Angels,” and I’m unable to put it down. I’m also reading a few whodunits, which I always do. Now I got my hands on one by Donna Leon, whom I very much admire.
How would you say books affect readers?
They’ll make the wretch less wretched, and the ignoramus less ignorant.
