Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel writes a reg­u­lar col­umn in Geist. He is a world-renowned trans­la­tor, an edi­tor and the author of many books, his most recent being City of Words (Anansi), The Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography (Douglas & McIntyre) and The Library at Night (Knopf). He was born in Buenos Aires and grew up in Tel Aviv. He lived in Toronto for twenty years, and now resides in the Poitou-Charentes region of France. He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). His biog­ra­phy and a list of hi pub­li­ca­tions can be found at alberto.manguel.com.

Alberto Manguel on Geist.com

Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour

He is one of the strangest crea­tures of that strangest of lit­er­ary bestiaries.

Role Models and Readers

 Ruskin’s read­ers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter’s table.

Dante in Guantánamo

After fol­low­ing Virgil down through the var­i­ous infer­nal cir­cles, Dante reaches the frozen lake where the souls of trai­tors are trapped up to their necks in ice.

Photo by Michael McLeod

Hospital Reading

When you find your­self laid up in a ster­ile hos­pi­tal room, which books do you want to have with you?

A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our eco­nomic sys­tem? Everything.

I Believe Because It’s Impossible

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish

When a poet friend was found dead after two days because of the do not disturb sign he had hung outside his hotel room, Darwish swore never again to hang the sign or lock his door. “When death comes,” he said, “I want to be disturbed.”

Jewish Gauchos

The colony had its heroes. The young son of a recent immigrant couple had been sent, after much parental sacrifice, to study in Buenos Aires, the big city. The boy had lived in the back room of his uncle’s house and dutifully attended school, until one day his uncle announced that he could no longer keep him, since he was selling his business. Desperate to finish his studies and ashamed of returning home defeated, the boy asked for assistance from the president of the Republic, Irigoyen himself. He walked over to the Presidential Palace, somehow got through the guards and, just as he was about to go into the president’s office, was arrested by the custodians. Since these were the days of Russian terrorism worldwide, and the threat of nihilists and anarchists was in everyone’s mind, the young man was threatened with prison. Neither his looks nor his accent spoke in his favour. As this was going on, President Irigoyen happened to ask what all the commotion was about and, upon being told, ordered that the prisoner be brought to him.

Eldorado

Art museums and geographical exp­loration curiously share a common story. The first chapter of the story takes place in Peru. In 1540, the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, lost in the strange Amazonian jungle, entrusted one of his men, Francisco de Orellana, to take their remaining brigantine and set off down the Napo River in search of provisions.

The Other Side of the Ice

Eighty-five years after Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, another film on the identity of the Inuit was hailed as a masterpiece around the world. This time, the director was himself an Inuit, Zacharias Kunuk, and his film told an Inuit story, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Something new, something that demanded a different receptive method for a different voice, was being shown, and, in the process, the audience was taught another way of seeing, a viewpoint from within the other culture itself.

In the Shadow of the Castle

Immediately after the New Year, both my daughters became victims of the First Great Snowfall of 1999.

How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read

A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have written enthusiastic reviews, and the booksellers I know tell me that it’s selling well. I haven’t read the book.

Geist’s Literary Precursors

Among the innumerable contributions of Geist to world culture, the Geist maps are not the least important. This noble genre that marries geography and the higher arts has, I have discovered, its particular ancestors, and can claim an aristocratic lineage that goes back to the days before the French Revolution.

Images of Work

Six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, the sisters Martha and Mary gave a dinner in honour of Jesus who (the gospels tell us) had raised their brother from the dead. Martha worked in the kitchen while Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest, to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. “Martha, Martha,” said Jesus. “You fret and fuss about many things, but only one thing is necessary. The part Mary has chosen is the best, and it will not be taken from her.”

Wordplay

Descartes believed that monkeys could speak, but that they preferred to remain silent in order not to be forced to work. The intellectual process of granting reality to an invention and then applying to that invention the rigid rules of reality is nowhere more splendidly demonstrated than in our relationship to language.

Idiot’s Fare

Dear George Szanto, I write in answer to your letter describing your difficulties in finding a publisher for your new novel.

Imaginary Islands

A few weeks ago, on November 4, 2003, fourteen Kurdish refugees and four Indonesian sailors landed a small ship on the coast of Melville Island, eighty kilometres north of Darwin in the territorial waters of Australia, with the intention of demanding political asylum. Apprised of the news and weary of the tide of asylum seekers, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, took a drastic decision: he decided to cut off Melville Island (together with four thousand other islands belonging to Australia) from the nation’s territory.

In Praise of the Enemy

The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.

Letter from France

For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.

Light and Dark

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating.

My Friendship With Rat And Mole

Several times, during a long life of reading, I’ve been tempted to write an autobiography based solely on the books that have counted for me. Someone once told me that it was customary for a Spanish nobleman to have his coat of arms engraved on the headboard of his bed so that visitors might know who it was who lay in a sleep that might always be his last. Why then not be identified by the books at my bedside that, better than a symbolic shield, define and represent me?

Pictures and Conversations

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Reading at a Time of Catastrophes

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Reading Beyond the Grave

"There are people," Chateaubriand comments, "who, in the midst of the collapse of empires, visit fountains and gardens"

Reading Up on War

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.

Van Gogh’s Final Vision

Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.

A Few Essential Words

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

Art and Blasphemy

No one can ignore that the publication of several caricatures of Mohammed in a number of periodicals around the world (first in Denmark, as a joke, then in other countries, as an act of defiance) ignited the furious protest of various Islamic groups. History repeats itself: faith, which is supposed to be the unmovable pillar of a true believer, seems to shiver and shake when confronted by a mere artistic creation, with a brushstroke or a few scribbled words, while in the name of the Supreme Being, his followers announce that a fit of divine temper is imminent.

Cautionary Tales for Children

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female. England would be seen as an Alice constantly confronted by absurd rules and conventions, Italy as the rebellious and soul-searching Pinocchio, Switzerland as the determined and self-sufficient Heidi and Canada as that intelligent, concerned survivalist, Anne of Green Gables.

Closing Time in the Gardens of the West

Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.

Cooking by the Book

When I first left home at the age of twenty and embarked on what turned out to be a largely nomadic existence, my grandmother gave me a small jar containing a packet of salt and a piece of bread. There was, she told me, an old Jewish folk tale about a traveller who is given such a gift by an angel so that he will never go hungry; and so that I too would never lack food, she wanted me to carry the jar wherever luck might take me.

Detective Samuel de Champlain

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

Europeans

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

Final Answers

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved