>>REVIEW
THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT
Alberto Manguel
Knopf Canada, 384 pp.
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and is the world itself.
– from The Library at Night
I used to work at a cavernous underground bookstore called The Bookseller that was found behind a hidden doorway and down a steep flight of stairs. I often imagined it as a literary bunker to provide safety for rare books in case a huge book-shredding twister, or fanatic book-burning happened above ground. Instead of hoarding tin-upon-tin filled with unpalatable rations, we, the keepers of the books, would insist on the preservation of the library, its esoteric contents slowly ripening and becoming more satisfying with page-cracking age.
Alberto Manguel has a secret chamber of his own. And so begins The Library at Night, where he sets off as a modest explorer in his own library and illuminates the far reaches of every topic he chooses to visit.
Manguel's writing is a seductively tactile account of a life spent in libraries. He personifies his books and libraries as living, breathing entities, states that "the love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned," and lays open a love that is at once encompassing and singularly his own. When Manguel reveals intimate navigations with careening pleasure and tender touch, he then deftly relates each one of these endearing anecdotes to the broader history and significance of the world's libraries.
From the memories of organizing his childhood libraries amid columns of books "slowly rising to transform the space into saprophyte forest" to the construction of his library that mixes traditional stone masonry with an inspired vision of Vita Sackville-West's personal library, these imaginative tales segue to the bold ambitions of Babel, Alexandria and to a 15th-century Chinese manuscript encyclopedia that bears the sunny title Monumental Compendium from the Era of Eternal Happiness. His mentor and friend, Jorge Luis Borges, loved his job as the Director of the Buenos Aires National Library so much that he celebrated each one of his birthdays at work.
Manguel regards order and the various classifications of books with fascination and anthropologic curiosity, but ultimately favours a sensual method of vertiginous reorganizing, seeing the practice of creating rigid systems slightly beside the point. He exposes zealous library directors hell-bent on economizing space, who he describes as "utterly insensitive to the experience of reading," for dumping materials copied onto microfilm. Still, the overwhelming volume of printed matter is a daunting proposition. He bemusedly cautions the reader of the unfortunate fellow who is entombed by fallen stacks of his own collection, "an avalanche of journals, magazines and books that he had stubbornly accumulated for over a decade." Much like a snippet from Christian Bök's Eunoia, where "books form cocoons of comfort – tombs to hold bookworms."
Through The Library at Night, stories of libraries looted, burned, saved, hidden, lost and found again also form a thick palimpsest of the darkest parts of human history – the terror of conquest, rape and genocide is inflicted on a people and on their books. When he finds a small Jewish prayer book in a Berlin flea market, we share in Manguel's profound sorrow of life and libraries lost. Our most cherished books become metaphors for survival. Among the most emotionally engaging accounts are the telling of the Birkenau concentration camp, where a children's library of eight books was miraculously hidden from the Nazis, despite the thousands of others that were burned, and of the inexcusable recent destruction of Baghdad's National Archives, Archeological Museum and National Library. More than half of the Iraqi collections were lost, including the oldest examples of writing. It is the hope for "one book rescued out of thousands, one reader rescued out of tens of thousands" that the act of keeping a library is an act of resistance against suffering and brutal cruelty.
The Library at Night also laments the loss of history and intimacy through the constantly available, digitized contents of the Internet. Regardless of the "nightmare of a constant present" found in the tenuous vacuum of the Web, libraries will continue to endure through the centuries and in the most surprising places. This pointed critique is followed by a description of the "donkey libraries," or "biblioburro," that were established in 1990 by the Colombian Ministry of Culture to distribute books through remote rural villages. This ingeniously modest solution is based on the idea of traveling bookmobiles, a practice that has been given yet another contemporary spin in the artist-driven Project Bookmobile, carrying a different selection of art books, zines and indie publications throughout Canada and the States each year.
The connections that Manguel traces between his books are as animated as a dream, and he maintains this aura of mysterious delight throughout The Library at Night. For the reader who is too insistent on deriving logical paths and well-argued conclusions, the book may prove tangential, but instead, Manguel offers glittering flashes of recognition to those who have pursued their own eccentric meanderings through the stacks.
The Library at Night is a circuitous tale, yet the references across time, history, geography, culture and genre are so seamlessly pieced together, it seems as if the book has always existed. And it has: Manguel is a humble and apt navigator through which the universes of our libraries have been given an impassioned voice. |
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