What do you do when you have to shift your personal library of some 35,000 books from a peaceful barn in a small French village to a tiny apartment in Manhattan? If you are Alberto Manguel, you write a book about it. Not to whine about the unfairness of it all or how to accommodate all the books, but rather to expound on the bookish life, the relationship between book and reader, memory, and reading.
Manguel’s Packing My Library is at once an intensely personal and startlingly universal musing on books. The subtitle, An Elegy and Ten Digressions , prepares us for the tone of the essays, but in the end surprises us, for it is more celebration than elegy.
I have been fascinated by Manguel ever since his A History of Reading, and his collections of essays. This philosopher of books, an Argentina-born Canadian via Israel (his father was a diplomat) who, as a teenager read to the blind writer Borges (what an education!) is back in Argentina as Director of the National Library, a post Borges once held.
Meeting him is always a delight. On the first occasion he wanted to know all about cricket, and ended up signing a book to me thus: “To Suresh, who knows all in life isn’t cricket.”
The title of his new book is a nod to the essay by Walter Benjamin in 1931, Unpacking My Library , where he says packing and unpacking are two sides of the same impulse, lending meaning to chaos. The collector, he writes is “dialectically pulled between the poles of order and disorder”.
“Packing,” says Manguel, “is an exercise in oblivion. It is like playing a film backwards, consigning visible narratives and methodological reality to the regions of the distant and unseen, a voluntary forgetting.”
The pain of separation is easy to understand. “I’ve often felt that my library explained who I was,” he writes, which makes packing it up “something of a self-obituary”.
If the poet can see a world in a grain of sand, a reader can see his own life cohere logically in his book collection. Manguel has more Plato than Aristotle, more Zola than Maupassant, and no John Grisham at all, although there are hundreds of detective novels. And I suspect if he has any Paulo Coelho, it is in his section on “bad books”. He once told an audience that if he saw a Coelho in someone’s shelf, a friendship was unlikely.
Loss helps you remember, says Manguel of his collection, “and loss of a library helps you remember who you truly are”. He takes inspiration from Don Quixote, whose books disappeared overnight in a puff of smoke. “Having lost his books as objects, he rebuilds his library in his mind and finds in the remembered pages the source for renewed strength.”
Loss might also put you on the road to heroic acts, to tilting at windmills, and to the writing of books that will survive in other libraries, forming new alliances.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
