Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

The City of Words

A world without frontiers

Alberto Manguel
Continuum, 166pp, £14.99,

William Skidelsky

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

William Skidelsky on Alberto Manguel's new book

Alberto Manguel, the dust jacket informs us, is an ‘anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor’ who was born in Argentina, moved to Canada in the 1980s and now lives partly in France. A generous gloss on this would be to say that he is an intrepid crosser of boundaries, someone whose identity is too open-ended for him to confine himself to any one profession or place. Less charitably, one might say that he is a man who doesn’t like to be pinned down. I felt a similar ambivalence on reading The City of Words. It is a work of staggering scope and erudition, packed with interesting information and arguments, and often beautifully written. Yet it, too, is hard to pin down. Despite having read it twice, I am still not sure that I know what Manguel is saying, exactly. His musings have an almost dream-like quality: while you are immersed in them, they seem wholly plausible; afterwards, though, they tend to dissolve into nothingness.

At least the central subject is clear. The City of Words is a book about storytelling — about mankind’s age-old need to make sense of the world in words. Manguel wants to convince us that the storytelling impulse is not merely valuable, but is also, in some sense, at the root of our humanity. If we stop telling stories, his logic goes, we cease to be fully human (which is why societies that censor or persecute writers are so pernicious). To illustrate how valuable stories are, Manguel cites a number of instances, both real and fictional, in which they have helped people survive tough situations. He tells of a concentration camp victim who set herself the task of remembering the stories that she had read out loud in the past. While this ‘did not lend meaning to her plight,’ it did remind her of ‘light at a time of dark catastrophe, helping her to survive.’ He describes a William Trevor short story in which a Northern Irish schoolteacher, driven to the brink of despair by the Troubles, resorts to telling her pupils about an English girl who is gang-raped by IRA soldiers and then commits suicide. The pupils are largely unmoved (‘stuff like that is in the papers the whole time’), but through the act of telling the teacher finds a measure of hope.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

1 | 2 Next page