A Reading Diary

A year of books

T
HERE 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

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 carries 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.

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.