A world without frontiers

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.’