San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Only 35,000 books to go
Essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel has devoted several books to the experience and cultural meaning of reading. They include “A History of Reading,” “A Reader on Reading” and “The Library at Night.”
Now comes “Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions.” Its title strikes a deliberate echo of Weimar-era cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “Unpacking My Library,” but the subtitle — “An Elegy” — hits a more sorrowful note. Benjamin spoke of wanting in his essay to share the mood, “certainly not an elegaic mood, but one of anticipation,” enjoyed by a collector disinterring his trove from storage at a new address.
Manguel mentions Benjamin mainly to contrast to own freewheeling acquisition of books with the German’s eccentric diligence as a collector.
Manguel begins his book evoking sadness at having to pack and store the roughly 35,000 volumes he had arrayed in a rural French farm building for 15 years, a library “that was to me an utterly private space that both enclosed and mirrored me.”
Resident at different times in his native Argentina, in Israel, Europe, Tahiti, Canada and the United States, Manguel had submitted to the discipline of culling, storing and parting with crate loads of books many times, but none of his libraries had the range and tonnage of the Loire Valley barn.
“A ... zany logic governed its geography,” Manguel writes. “Its major sections were determined by the language in which the books were written ... all books written originally in Spanish or French, English
Packing My Library
An Elegy and Ten Digressions
or Arabic (the latter a language which I can’t speak or read) sat together on a shelf. Certain subjects — the history of the book, biblical commentaries, the legend of Faust, Renaissance literature and philosophy, gay studies, medieval bestiaries — had separate sections ... I collected thousands of detective novels but very few spy stories, more Plato than Aristotle, the complete works of Zola and hardly any Maupassant, all of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick but barely any of the authors on ‘The New York Times’ bestseller list. I had ... dozens of very bad books which I didn’t throw away in case I ever needed an example of a book I thought was bad.”
Despite his many-limbed library’s sprawl, Manguel writes, “I always knew how to find a book because the only user was myself.”
His new book traces an arc from that solitary bounty to his current situation as director of the National Library of Argentina, an appointment that came by surprise invitation not long after he had left France for a small Manhattan apartment.
The transition forced him to test and rethink some of his notions about the function and fate of reading. The “digressions” offer glimpses of that process before his book’s reader realizes where they are headed.
“Ever since my first books,” he writes, “I had wanted to put my ideas about reading and libraries into action. Now I got my wish with a vengeance. From one day to the next, I have become an accountant, technician, lawyer, architect, electrician, psychologist, diplomat, sociologist, specialist in union politics, technocrat, cultural programmer, and, of course, administrator of actual library matters.”
Manguel has always thought and written illuminatingly about the social and personal value of literacy and scholarship, but his unsought role as national librarian forced a new pragmatism on him. “Why are most of our societies so weak in what we might call civic ethics?,” he writes. “And more important for me, can a national library, as a central symbol of a society’s identity, serve as a source of learning the vocabulary of civic ethics and as a workshop for its practice?”
Although he keeps a positive tone, Manguel is no glassy-eyed optimist. “[C]onfronted with the blind imbecility with which we try to destroy our planet, the relentlessness with which we inflict pain on ourselves and others, the extent of our greed and cowardice and envy, the arrogance with which we strut among our fellow living creatures,” Manguel writes, “it is hard to believe that writing — literature or any other art, for that matter — teaches us anything ... In at least one sense, however, all literature is civic action: because it is memory ... all literature is testimonial.”
In other words, literature and literacy are the enemies of collective amnesia, which is always corrosive of “civic ethics.”
“[L]iterature may not be able to save anyone from injustice,” Manguel concludes, “[B]ut something about it must be perilously effective if every dictator, every totalitarian government, every threatened official tries to do away with it, by burning books, by banning books, by censoring books ... by insinuating that reading is an elitist activity.”
Score one more perilously effective argument for the humanizing force of literature from Alberto Manguel.
Kenneth Baker is the former art critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com