Reading without boundaries

It is possible that Alberto Manguel has read more books than anybody else on earth. He can lecture in English and French, reads Italian and has translated works into Spanish. He lives in Canada, having spent his childhood in Israel (where his father was Argentina's ambassador) and in Argentina. The first language he spoke was German ("with a Czech accent, thanks to the maid," he says). Described variously as essayist, critic, translator, novelist, anthologist, Manguel, 67, refers to himself as a "reader", and his A History of Reading is already a classic.

His latest book, Curiosity, begins with the line, "I am curious about curiosity." Then follows the dazzling interplay of words and thoughts, of connections and severances, of history and reinterpretations. And above all, a journey with Dante.

“Books are very patient,” he told a rapt audience at the London Review Bookshop recently. He was referring to the fact that he came to Dante rather late in life. “But books wait for you,” he said encouragingly. Still, even if the youngest member there read a book for the rest of his life in three or four different languages, it is unlikely he would have read as much as Manguel already has.

It is the kind of thought that might discourage some. Luckily, Manguel has inspired more people to read books than most. There is his passion, for one. And his gift for connecting dots and delving into history and culture that bring books alive. A casual glance at the index of Curiosity, under the letter 'B' gives us Beckett, Berlin (Isaiah). Bhagwad Gita, Burroughs (Edgar Rice), Pope Boniface VIII, Borges. Manguel can bring them all together, perhaps adding Plato and Tarzan for seasoning –  all in one paragraph. And do it naturally, without strain.

In that list Jorge Luis Borges is special. When Manguel was 16 and working in a bookshop, Borges walked in and asked if the youngster would be willing to read to the blind writer. It was the most fortuitous meeting in literature. Borges became Manguel's guide and philosopher, taking him through the highways and bylanes of literature; giving him a sense of what can only be called Borgesian.

Besides a love for the mischievous, the association perhaps convinced Manguel that it is sometimes more important to ask the question than to provide resolutions. Curiosity is a ride through books and what make them. It continues a lifelong journey into writing and its equal partner, reading. Dante's Divine Comedy, Manguel told his audience in London, is possibly the greatest work in literature, greater than anything Cervantes or Shakespeare ever wrote. Sitting beside him, Englishman John Sutherland, who was "in conversation" as they say at book launches in India, refused to rise to the bait.

Sutherland, English professor and author of books on books himself, brought to the discussions a delightful combination of seriousness and laughter. "Manguel vaults over the traditional fences of genre, literary history, and discipline with breathtaking virtuosity," he said of Curiosity. "He is the Montaigne of our day. If they put another rover on Mars they should call it 'Manguel'."

For 'Curiosity' might easily be the title of Manguel's autobiography. The quality of curiosity is never strained. Not in Manguel's case, not in the case of his hero Dante. Thanks to modern methods of communication, Manguel passes on his curiosity to his readers, through the written word, through the spoken word and through his words in other people's writings. It is a journey that we take along with him, grateful for his signposts and even more so for his singular lack of condescension. From a man who owns some 30,000 books (he has them in a house in France), and has read so much, this is nothing short of kindness.

"The library in the daytime is an organised place," he told me in India once, "but at night you can imagine the books talking to one another, making love and producing new books. It is a different world." It is a world Manguel has explored in The Library at Night, a joyous coming together of his love for books, of order and disorder and what ifs.

“Stories are our memory, libraries are the storerooms of that memory, and reading is the craft by means of which we can recreate that memory by reciting it and glossing it, by translating it back into our own experience, by allowing ourselves to build upon that which previous generations have seen fit to preserve,” he wrote.

Two years ago, around Christmas, Manguel sat down to write a letter, but, as he says, words kept escaping him, disappearing into thin air. He had had a stroke. "To prove to myself I had not lost the capacity for remembering words, only that of expressing them out loud, I began to recite in my head bits of literature I knew by heart. Poe, Dante, Hugo.

"It left me with a question. What are these thoughts that have not yet achieved their verbal state of maturity?”"

This is the essential Manguel –  one who moves from the personal to the specific to the universal. He is a philosopher of the written word. And books are 'home', for this travelling purveyor of stories and ideas. "As a child it can be disconcerting shifting from city to city, country to country," he once said. "But when I opened my books, and saw the prints and the illustrations, I felt comforted. I knew I was home."

Today, the world is his home –  he brings that cliché alive –  and the written word anywhere is his raw material. Cervantes and Dante, Borges and Hume, Auden and Fuento, murder mysteries, erotic literature, are all sieved through the experience of this remarkable man. A man of infinite curiosity.

At one point in the London Review Bookshop session, the 76 year-old Sutherland –  who was wearing a bandage after breaking his wrist while rock climbing -- interrupted to say, "If I had two hands, this is where I would be applauding." The audience didn't need prompting.

The author is Editor, Wisden India Almanack