A Reading Diary Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2004 Alberto Manguel

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in 2004 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace ownership of copyright materials. Information enabling the Publisher to rectify any reference or credit in future editions will be welcomed.

  Permission to quote from Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing has been given by the author.

  All photographs, with the exception of three, belong to the collection of the author. The image of the book, also used on the jacket, is from Brand X Pictures/Getty Images. The image on page 100 is of Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin in the title role in the 1933 film Don Quixote, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst (film still from the collection of E.C. Paris). The image on page 132 by Kristine Connidis is reprinted with permission.

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Manguel, Alberto, 1948–

  A reading diary / Alberto Manguel.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37026-6

  1. Manguel, Alberto, 1948– —Diaries.

  2. Manguel, Alberto, 1948– —Books and reading. I. Title.

  PS8576.A544Z47 2004 C814.54 C2004-901903-1

  v3.1

  This book is for Craig

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Part One 2002 Chapter 1 - June: The Invention of Morel

  Chapter 2 - July: The Island of Dr. Moreau

  Chapter 3 - August: Kim

  Chapter 4 - September: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave

  Chapter 5 - October: The Sign of Four

  Chapter 6 - November: Elective Affinities

  Chapter 7 - December: The Wind in the Willows

  Part Two 2003 Chapter 8 - January: Don Quixote

  Chapter 9 - February: The Tartar Steppe

  Chapter 10 - March: The Pillow-Book

  Chapter 11 - April: Surfacing

  Chapter 12 - May: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

  Acknowledgments

  A year of books

  JUNE The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

  JULY The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells

  AUGUST Kim by Rudyard Kipling

  SEPTEMBER Memoirs from Beyond the Grave

  by François-René de Chateaubriand

  OCTOBER The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  NOVEMBER Elective Affinities

  by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  DECEMBER The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Granarne

  JANUARY Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

  FEBRUARY The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati

  MARCH The Pillow-Book by Sei Shonagon

  APRIL Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

  MAY The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

  by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

  Foreword

  “ … that we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valour and generosity we have.”

  THOREAU, Waiden

  “Like every person of good taste, Menard abominated such worthless pantomimes, only apt—he would say—to provoke the plebeian pleasure of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthrall us with the rudimentary notion that all ages are the same or that they are different.”

  JORGE LUIS BORGES, Ficciones

  THERE ARE BOOKS that we skim over happily, forgetting one page as we turn to the next; others that we read reverently, without daring to agree or disagree; others that offer mere information and preclude our commentary; others still that, because we have loved them so long and so dearly, we can repeat, word by word, since we know them, in the truest sense, by heart.

  Reading is a conversation. Lunatics engage in imaginary dialogues which they hear echoing somewhere in their minds; readers engage in a similar dialogue provoked silently by words on a page. Usually the reader’s response is not recorded, but often a reader will feel the need to take up a pencil and answer back on the margins of a text. This comment, this gloss, this shadow that sometimes accompanies our favourite books extends and transports the text into another time and another experience; it lends reality to the illusion that a book speaks to us and wills us (its readers) into being.

  A couple of years ago, after my fifty-third birthday, I decided to reread a few of my favourite old books, and I was struck, once again, by how their many-layered and complex worlds of the past seemed to reflect the dismal chaos of the world I was living in. A passage in a novel would suddenly illuminate an article in the daily paper; a half-forgotten episode would be recalled by a certain scene; a single word would prompt a long reflection. I decided to keep a record of these moments.

  It occurred to me then that, rereading a book a month, I might complete, in a year, something between a personal diary and a commonplace book: a volume of notes, reflections, impressions of travel, sketches of friends, of events public and private, all elicited by my reading. I made a list of what the chosen books would be. It seemed important, for the sake of balance, that there should be a little of everything. (Since I’m nothing if not an eclectic reader, this wasn’t too difficult to accomplish.)

  Reading is a comfortable, solitary, slow and sensuous task. Writing used to share some of these qualities. However, in recent times the profession of writer has acquired something of the ancient professions of travelling salesman and repertory actor, and writers are called upon to perform one-night stands in faraway places, extolling the virtues of their own books instead of toilet brushes or encyclopedia sets. Mainly because of these duties, throughout my reading year I found myself travelling to many different cities and yet wishing to be back home, in my house in a small village in France, where I keep my books and do my work.

  Scientists have imagined that, before the universe came into being, it existed in a state of potentiality, time and space held in abeyance—“in a fog of possibility,” as one commentator put it, until the Big Bang. This latent existence should surprise no reader, for whom every book exists in a dreamlike condition until the hands that open it and the eyes that peruse it stir the words into awareness. The following pages are my attempt to record a few such awakenings.

  ALBERTO MANGUEL

  Part One

  2002

  June

  The Invention of Morel

  SATURDAY

  We have been in our house in France for just over a year, and already I have to leave, to visit my family in Buenos Aires. I don’t want to go. I want to enjoy the village in summer, the garden, the house kept cool by the thick, ancient walls. I want to start setting up the books on the shelves we have just had built. I want to sit in my room and work.

  On the plane, I pull out a copy of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, the tale of a man stranded on an island that is apparently inhabited by ghosts, a book I read for the first time thirty, thirty-five years ago.

  This is my first visit to Buenos Aires after the December crisis of 200I, which unhitched the peso from the dollar, saw the economy crash and left thousands of people ruined. Downtown, there are no visible signs of the disaster except that, just before nightfall, the streets fill with hordes of cartoneros, men, women and children who scrape a living by collecting recyclable rubbish off the sidewalks. Perhaps most crises are invisible: there are no attendant pathetic fallacies to help us see the devastation. Shops close, people look haggard, prices jump, but overall life carr
ies on: the restaurants are full, the shops still stock expensive imports (though I overhear one woman complaining, “I can’t find aceto balsámico anywhere!”), the city bustles noisily long past midnight. A tourist in a city that was once my own, I don’t see the growing slums, the hospitals lacking supplies, the bankruptcies, the middle class joining soup-kitchen queues.

  My brother wants to buy me a new recording of Bach’s Magnificat. He stops at five bank machines before one agrees to release a few bills. I ask, what will he do when he can’t find an obliging machine? There will always be at least one, he says, with magical confidence.

  The Invention of Morel begins with a phrase now famous in Argentine literature: “Today, on this island, a miracle happened.” Miracles in Argentina appear to be quotidian. Bioy’s narrator: “Here are neither hallucinations nor images: merely real men, at least as real as myself.”

  Picasso used to say that everything was a miracle, and that it was a miracle one didn’t dissolve in one’s bath.

  LATER

  I walk past Bioy’s apartment, next to the cemetery of La Recoleta, where the blue-blooded families of Argentina lie buried in ornate mausoleums topped with weeping angels and broken columns. Bioy, whose novels (whether set on faraway islands or in other cities) chronicle the phantasmagoric atmosphere of the city where he always lived, disliked La Recoleta; he found it absurd that anyone should persist in being snobbish after death.

  I find Buenos Aires a ghostly place now. Gombrowicz, who came to this city from Poland in the late 1930s and left twenty-four years later, wrote on the ship that was taking him away for ever, “Argentina! In my dreams, with half-shut eyes, I search for her once again within myself—with all my strength. Argentina! It is so strange, and all I want to know is this: why did I never feel such passion for Argentina in Argentina itself? Why does it assault me now, when I am far away?” I understand his perplexity. Like an ancient ruined city, it haunts you from a distance. Here the past is present in layers, generation after generation of ghosts: the people of my childhood, my disappeared schoolmates, the battered survivors.

  In the Magnificat, the choir overlaps countless repetitions of “omnes, omnes generationes” crowd after crowd of the dead rising to bear witness.

  In Buenos Aires itself, people don’t see the ghosts. People seem to live here in a state of mad optimism: “It can’t get worse,” “Something will come up.”

  Remy de Gourmont (to whom Bioy owed an unacknowledged debt): “We must be happy, even if it is only for the sake of our pride.”

  Silvia, my old schoolmate, tells me that in my school is a plaque to the students murdered by the military. She says I’ll recognize several names.

  SUNDAY

  Argentinians have long bragged about their so-called viveza criolla, or endemic cunning. But this trickster mentality is a double-edged weapon. In literature its incarnation is Ulysses, who was for Homer a clever hero—saviour of the Greeks, scourge of Troy, victor over Polyphemus and the Sirens—and for Dante a liar and a cheat condemned to the eighth circle of Hell. Though lately Argentinians seem to have confirmed Dante’s dictum, I wonder if it’s still possible to revert to Homer’s vision and use this dangerous gift in order to vanquish prodigies and overcome obstacles. I’m not optimistic.

  Last December, in an angry article in Le Monde, I ended by saying that now “Argentina is no longer and the bastards who destroyed it are still alive.” An indignant Argentinian psychoanalyst compared my conclusion to that of the European and American bankers who rejected all guilt for the downfall of the country and saw in it some kind of just retribution for Argentinian arrogance. Such an inane comparison is perhaps due to the psychoanalyst’s own inability (like that of most Argentinians) to accept the fact that, if anything is to change, the country must redefine itself and, above all, establish an unimpeachable justice system.

  IN THE EVENING

  The experience of everyday life negated by what we want it to be, negated in turn by what we hope it really is.

  The unnamed narrator of Bioy’s novel is on the run after committing an unspecified crime, always believing that even here on this distant island, lost somewhere in the Caribbean, “they” will come and catch him. And at the same time, he more or less expects miraculous events: salvation, food, falling in love. From within the character, flight and fancy are coherent; from without, it is like watching the unfolding of a mad double reality, two-headed and contradictory.

  The physical reality of the island confirms the narrator’s impressions of nightmare, except that these are filtered, of course, through that same narrator’s eyes. I sit in a café. Coffee is served with packets of sugar bearing the faces of famous twentieth-century characters. I can choose between Chaplin and Mandela. Someone has left an empty Che Guevara sugar packet in the ashtray. Afterwards, I walk by a fresh pasta shop called La Sonámbula, “The Sleepwalker.” The window of a prêt-à-porter is empty except for a large sign: Todo debe desaparecer, “Everything must disappear.” Outside a pharmacy, a woman with a doctor’s prescription in her hand is asking those who enter to buy her the medicine she needs, because she has no money.

  Bioy’s narrator has been warned not to attempt to reach the island because of a mysterious disease that (rumour has it) infects all those who land there, killing “from outside inwards.” The nails and hair fall out, the skin and the corneas die, and the body lives on for some eight to fifteen days. The surface dies before the inner core. The people he sees are, of course, only surface.

  But why keep a diary? Why write down all these notes? The mysterious master of the island, Morel, explains his reasons for keeping a record of his memories: “To lend perpetual reality to my sentimental fantasy.”

  I miss my new garden in France, my new walls.

  MONDAY

  Bioy—aristocratic, intellectual, lady-killer Bioy—describes or foresees the world of the common victim: a literary victim, of course, pursued by literary misfortunes. A Cuban friend once told me that, in Cuba, Bioy is read as a political fabulist; his stories are seen as denunciations of those unjustly condemned, hunted down, all those who suffer the fate of exiles and refugees. “I’ll show how the world, by perfecting the police, the use of identity papers, the press, wireless, customs, renders any judicial error irreparable, and is now one undivided hell for all those who are persecuted.” The tone (the words are spoken by the narrator) was meant to be self-pitying; today they have a documentary ring. I wonder what Bioy would have thought of this reading, he who considered the label écrivain engagé a damning insult.

  In The Invention of Morel, everything is told hesitatingly. The old trick: verisimilitude in fiction is achieved through a pretended lack of certainty.

  MIDDAY

  I meet Silvia at La Puerto Rico, the café my friends and I used to go to when we were in high school. It hasn’t changed: the wood-panelled walls, the round, grey stone tables, the hard chairs, the smell of roasted coffee, even perhaps the same waiters, agelessly old, in stained white smocks. Silvia describes the state of the country as an adolescence come once again. More ghosts, studying for exams at that table, waiting for a friend at that other one, making plans for summer camp at the one over there—all people now disappeared, dead, lost.

  In Morel’s villa, which he calls a museum, the library contains (with one exception) only works of fiction: novels, poetry, drama. Nothing “real.”

  The English-speaking reader has not yet discovered the works of Bioy. Though his books are published in the United States, they are not read, and the first (perhaps only) novel by Bioy published in England was The Dream of the Heroes, in 1986. The ignorance of the English-speaking reader never ceases to amaze me.

  TUESDAY

  The magazine stands are full of glossy publications that track the lives of the rich and famous in exultant banality. Life carries on. Alfred Döblin ends his exile journal back in Baden-Baden after the war and remarks of his fellow Germans, “They have not yet experienced what it is they have experienc
ed.”

  My sister, who is a psychoanalyst and one of the most intelligent people I know, tells me that almost all of her patients are undergoing a crisis. But there is also a resurgence of the creative impulse: dozens of new literary and political magazines have appeared, and theatre and film have acquired a new life. The country’s downfall has mysteriously given birth to a palpable atmosphere of creativity, as if artists and writers had suddenly decided to conjure up from the dust that which has been stolen from them.

  Morel reminds me of certain characters (Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard or the faithful daughter in Merchant-Ivory’s Autobiography of a Princess) who spend their days watching the past come to life on a screen. The theme of the loved one recalled as a projected image appears for the first time, as far as I know, in an 1892 Jules Verne novel, The Carpathian Castle (which, according to Gavin Ewart, inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula). In Verne’s version, the eccentric Baron Gortz brings back to life the beautiful opera singer Stilla, who has died in the middle of her farewell performance, and with whom the Baron has been long and obsessively in love. In the end, it is revealed that what the Baron has recreated is not her flesh and blood, but merely her image captured on a glass pane, and her voice in a recording.

  (I now remember an earlier example: the shadows in Plato’s cave.)

  Bioy follows the precepts of the detective novel: hide nothing from the very beginning, reveal nothing until the last possible moment. (Although, in The Invention of Morel, the revelation appears almost exactly halfway through the novel.)