Loved every page of this scrumptious book. Manguel has a knack for selecting snippets and anecdotes (how on earth did he manage to collect all those facts?!) and stringing them together in such a way as to make you greedy for more. And the illustrations are simply a treat: the book is unbelievably full of them.Manguel begins on a personal note, recounting how he read to Borges every evening for two years. Borges, though blind, had an astounding memory and would command (the selection for the evening), stop, comment, reinforce and remould every text being read out:
Reading out loud to the blind man was a curious experience because, even though I felt, with some effort, in control of the tone and pace of the reading, it was nevertheless Borges, the listener, who became the master of the text... Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible.
The chapter titles give a vague idea of the scope of the book and Manguel's idiosyncratic approach, thanks to which you are always sharing the delights and discoveries of a fellow reader who ardently, conspiratorially unveils a complicated map connecting books, readers, writers and translators at different points in history:
Something in the relationship between a reader and a book is recognised as wise and fruitful, but it is also seen as disdainfully exclusive and excluding, perhaps because the image of an individual curled up in a corner, seemingly oblivious of the grumblings of the world, suggests impenetrable privacy and a selfish eye and singular secretive action... Ivory, according to Virgil, is the material out of which the Gate of False Dreams is made; according to Saint-Beuve, it is also the material out of which is made the reader's tower.
* * * *
"The Last Page" says the title of the first chapter, referring to the desire to put off the last page of a savoured book for the next day. "Reading the future", says another. There is "Private Reading" and there are "The Silent Readers" (where you meet the young Saint Augustine perplexed at Saint Ambrose's habit of reading silently at all times in an age when almost all reading was synonymous with reading aloud) and also "Being Read to". "The Author as Reader" points out another chapter, "The Translator as Reader", echoes yet another. And of course there is "Forbidden Reading" which attains the status of an act of courage and defiance. Whoever said the reader is an ineffectual idler as Manguel's grandmother thought when he would read on Sunday afternoons? Yet, all of us can empathise with his experience of being branded as a withdrawn and abnormal creature living in a book-lined bedroom.
Manguel doesn't seem to leave out any interest that comes along with the reading habit: book covers, book collections, large libraries, shapes of books and bookshelves, publications, the texture of books -- from clay tablets and scrolls to paperbacks (ah, the story of Penguin's origin was such delightful trivia!) and CD-ROMs --, famous libraries, notorious book-theives too! And glasses, of course, an age-old symbol of the "book fool".
A touch of philosphy here, for metaphors of reading, as Manguel says, are many:
[T]he Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana [said], "There are books in which footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books."
From the Syrians and Greeks to ur contemporaries, from Aristotle and Alexander to Kafka and Rilke, A History of Reading offers little-known incidents and facts from the lives of memorable personas. It is amazing how Manguel travels with ease from an anecdote about Rilke finding himself without his wallet in a saloon where his famous name cannot win him the trust of the barbers -- to the peculiar flavour of Rilke's poetry and his translations that always sought to capture an elusive truth just beyond the poet's grasp. Dickens' histrionics, Tennyson's touchiness about criticism, Lady Carlyle's love of sensational books and Proust's fondness for reading in the darkness with lamplight shining on the surface of the book alone, all fulfil that curiosity for human details of writers I have always nurtured.
Not only did I learn about many little-known writers and readers, but also felt that I had understood more than one writer better, thanks to a chapter in Manguel, than I did by reading the writer's own work (Kafka tops the list: a single chapter has made me much more sympathetic towards his writing than I ever hoped to be. Why, I am even curious to read his biography now. Walt Whitman's as well). And some simply came alive, like Borges marvelling at the "irony of God" that had given him "darkness" and the charge of a massive library at the same time.
The only slight irritant for me in the book was Manguel's tendency to occasionally drift into the realm of mystifying expression. Like this:
The primordial relationship between writer and reader presents a wonderful paradox: in creating the role of the reader, the writer also decrees the writer's death, since in order for a text to be finished the writer must withdraw, cease to exist.
But this slight indulgence on part of a fond reader -- or a little trip of fancy on part of an indulgent writer -- is easily forgiven; indeed it even becomes friendly in the last chapter, where Manguel lets loose his imagination to dwell on the endless book that would be The History of Reading.
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Must thank Rog for this excellent recommendation. :)
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