Goodbye to all that | 12 April 2018

Alberto Manguel is a kind of global Reader Laureate: he is reading’s champion, its keenest student and most zealous proselytiser, an ideal exemplar of the Reader embodied. And reading is not only his committed, devoted practice, but also the very subject of some of his best writing. His latest book to wander through this familiar domain was prompted by the traumatic experience of packing away his huge personal library, when he and his partner found themselves needing to downsize from a cavernous French barn (containing 35,000 volumes ‘in its prime’) to a small apartment in New York City.

Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions is a loosely arranged collection of small essays triggered by this change in his relationship to his books, and — because a library is always a manifestation of autobiography — a necessary reappraisal of where this change will leave him. This is a man whose life experiences have always been given meaning by his reading experiences: when a white owl flies past, it’s not just a white owl, but ‘like the angel that Dante describes steering the ship of souls to the shores of Purgatory’.

As ever, Manguel ranges widely. The serendipitous pleasures of dictionaries, the mysteries of books’ true origins, remembering and forgetting, the popular trope of the writer starving in an unheated garret, how language embodies faith, the Golem, the inevitable failure of any author’s attempt to represent reality perfectly (unless that author is God), the inevitability of human aloneness — all these and more have a place in this small, generous book. Opening it at random on page 88, I find Stephen Hawking, Humpty Dumpty and Nebuchadnezzar. As when browsing a library, there’s seeming randomness in the order — or is it the other way around? — and it isn’t always easy to keep up (clever writing insists upon clever reading, after all); but the erudite mixes nicely with the personal, too.