The use of technology today is a circus: Alberto Manguel on the state of reading

Bibliophile Alberto Manguel is an award-winning Canadian writer, translator, editor and critic, born in Buenos Aires in 1948. He lives in a small village in France, surrounded by more than 40,000 volumes. He has published several novels, including News From a Foreign Country Came, and All Men Are Liars, and non-fiction, including A History of Reading, The Library at Night and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.  Excerpts from an interview:

You’ve travelled extensively since an early age. How did this affect or impact you as a child?

We travelled a lot because my father was in the diplomatic service and I would often find myself in rooms I didn’t know, surrounded by voices I couldn’t understand. So from a very early age, I felt that my only grounding place were my books. I remember the relief with which I would go to bed at night—and it would often be an unknown bed - and open my book. There on the same page was the same text and the same illustration and that gave me comfort and a sense of security.

So did you travel with a lot of books?

I was fortunate that throughout my childhood, I was looked after by a nanny who travelled with me—she was the one who taught me English and German before I learned Spanish. She treated children as if they were adults, that is to say, with intelligence and respect for the imagination that every child has. So she allowed me my books because I liked them. I could go to bookstores and choose the books that I wanted and we always had a book bag to put them in. She never said that the books were too many or that they were the wrong books. So I developed my own taste, which is what every child should be allowed.

What did you read at the time? Also, do you think there’s a concept of the right age to read certain books?

There was no such thing as the idea of children’s literature in my generation, or at least I didn’t know of it. I was never told that there were books I shouldn’t read because I was a child. So sometimes, my choices were mistaken. I tried to read Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear when I was, I think, seven, and didn’t understand a word. But that led me to have great confidence in the ‘universal library’. I knew that there were books that were meant for me at a certain time and books that might be for me in the future. I learned that books are very patient and that they wait for us.

You had an understanding of that at a young age?

In an intuitive way, I couldn’t have put it into these words. But I had the feeling that a bookstore or a library was a convivial place where I would find friends.

I find the fact that you set up a library so fascinating. I remember dreaming, when I first started reading as a child, of having a library of my own. How did that come about for you?

Throughout my life, the different places that I’ve lived have always been small because of the lack of resources, and therefore, I never had the space to have all my books together. I would put them into boxes and have them wait. But I used to have the feeling that the books are calling to me at night, as victims of premature burials! But eventually, just when I turned 50 and my children had grown up and left , leading their own lives, I felt that I could at last go somewhere where I could find real estate cheap enough to launch a library. I finally found it in a little village in France where I set up the library and had all the books from all my boxes come together. I spent a wonderful few months sorting them out and meeting old friends and making new acquaintances.

So in a sense, no matter where you went, the books were your constants.

Yes, books are the constants. They are our memory. They are the memory of our experiences individually and socially. They hold words that describe us, define us and define our experiences. It’s extraordinary that not many people take advantage of this gift. We complain of not understanding what is happening in the world and of feeling lost and disempowered. We don’t use this extraordinary resource that is there at our disposal. On the contrary, we denigrate it and deride it and try to convince young people that it’s not worth their while because everything needs to be easy and quick, especially in this day and age.

Do you lament about the state of reading today?

In the first century, the poet Marshall, lamented that there were no good readers of poetry anymore and that everyone went to the circus. So it’s a very ancient complaint!

So would you call technology a circus?

I would call the use we make of technology a circus. We shouldn’t blame technology, because it is just an instrument. It’s like blaming a knife of committing murder. We make such bad use of technology. There is a need for the proper use of technology in the realm of artistic creation, in a richer and more original way.

Coming to the books you’ve written, having published several non-fiction as well as fiction books, is there one format you prefer over the other?

The pleasure in both is different. When I write non-fiction, I love the research. I love to have my ideas wander and go to a place I don’t know. But when I write fiction, I have to invent everything, so it’s much more complicated. It takes a much more coherent and rational mind. Sure, this is a paradox because you would think that non-fiction is more logical than fiction. But I think it is the contrary. And the most logical genre, which I’m not capable of, is poetry.