March 13, 1948

Alberto Manguel (March 13, 1948) is an Argentinian writer who now has Canadian citizenship, and a home in France. His books like The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980), A History of Reading (1996), The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), all have a peculiar slant. We read:

'[These books] all tremble with carefulness. I can't imagine him putting the letters together to form a reckless word. It is as though his writing self is still a boy cupping his hands around fragile birds or butterflies and offering them up to us with a serious, wide-eyed whisper of "Wow! Look at this!" ....'

We glimpse a life out of the ordinary further on in this interview which we cite for the text above, and that below.

'Although he was born in Argentina, his father's diplomatic career led to a childhood of travel, during which books gave him "a permanent home, and one I could inhabit exactly as I felt like, at any time, no matter how strange the room in which I had to sleep, or how unintelligible the voices outside my door". He loved the shrill covers of the Noddy books and the hurtle of a Rider Haggard plot. He was swept away by Homer and Conan Doyle – although he thought Chekhov was supposed to be a detective writer and found the mystery in "Lady with a Lapdog" rather thin. As an adolescent back in Buenos Aires, he would curl up alone among the "small, silent miracles" of his father's largely unused library, where many of the books had been trimmed to fit the shelves, often lopping off first lines or page numbers. "Sometimes I would make the effort to go outside and be with others, but there was nothing as exciting as a Stevenson story in the real world."

'Now his own children tell him that their home in Canada – a converted barn – is like a library. "They joke that they need a ticket to get in," he laughs. All of his own writing has been a direct result of the volumes in which he has sought refuge. Manguel was commissioned to write his first translation (Katherine Mansfield into Spanish) when he was just 18. Was he intimidated by the responsibility? "Oh no, not at all. I have often felt…" he breaks off, looks, and laughs again loudly, "an overwhelming sense of irresponsibility!"'

It may be this balancing of irreverence with a sobriety about literary spaces that explain the charm of the topics about which Alberto Manguel writes.

Another of his titles By The Light Of The Glow-worm Lamp: Three Centuries of Reflections on Nature, (1998) is blurbed:

'From ancient Greece to the close of the second millennium, the keen scientific eye has been translated over and over into graceful and meaningful texts in which not only the world observed but the act of observation itself is set down for the common reader.'

To this end Manguel quotes another: "Sometimes a tame cat takes to the woods and when it does, it becomes wilder than a wild cat." In this case the act of observation does not correlate well with the world observed, but such inaccuracies are rare.