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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Little time for Proust or Tolstoy

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Alberto Manguel is the notoriously well-read international man of letters, author of A History of Reading. Between 1964 and 1968 he was one of those who read aloud to the blind Borges in Buenos Aires, ‘minor Boswells whose identities are rarely known to one another but who collectively hold the memory of one of the world’s great readers’. Few indeed of them have remained silent. With Borges is his modest and pleasant contribution to the pile of printed encounters. It is short — something the subject, at his best as short as Kipling, would have appreciated. Though grand claims are made here and there that Borges more than any other writer of his time altered readers’ relations with books, ‘renewed the Spanish language’ — a lot of people appear to have done that — and ‘changed forever the nature of literature’, they are not pursued, and for the most part Manguel avoids the excessive reverence of which Borges in life and death has been a frequent victim — Borgesians can be as tiresomely precious and sycophantic as the fans of Jane Austen. Manguel gives in his small compass a lot of facts.

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