Borges and the Impossibility of Writing

Alberto Manguel is an internationally acclaimed essayist, novelist, anthologist, translator, and editing. The bestselling author of numerous award-winning titles, he acknowledges books and reading as his essential subjects as they define our experience and shape human thought. “I believe that we are, at the core, reading animals,” he writes in A Reader on Reading. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything.” An indefatigable reader, Mr. Manguel is legendary for the voluminous library contained within his mind. And yet the physical pleasure and rewards of handling and perusing—re-reading—printed, ink-on-paper books remain irreplaceable for him, especially in a digital age when “brief and quick and easy” are valued over “slowness,…depth,… [and] difficulty.”

Mr. Manguel’s love affair with literature began when he was invited by the blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to read aloud to him at his home, which the young Manguel continued to do from 1964 to 1968. He eventually traveled to Europe and Tahiti, where he pursued a living with words: writing, translating, editing, and reviewing. In the 1980s, Mr. Manguel relocated to Toronto, where he contributed to national newspapers as well as to the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; directed the Maclean Hunter Arts Journalism Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts; and held an appointment as Distinguished Visiting Writer in the Markin-Flanagan Program at the University of Calgary. In 2000 he moved to France and makes his home in a medieval presbytery near the Loire, which he restored to house his ever-expanding personal library and writes about in The Library at Night. He has an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège and is an Officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters. 

Mr. Manguel’s many noteworthy publications include With Borges, a portrait of the brilliant reader-writer; A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a compendium of fictional realms, coauthored by Gianni Guadalupi; A History of Reading, which traces the 6000-year-old record of the written word; Reading Pictures, a guide to interpreting art; A Reading Diary, the author’s musings on twelve favorite books; The City of Words, a collection of lectures on the universality of storytelling; The Library at Night, a personal meditation on the critical role libraries play in civilization, published by Yale University Press; and A Reader on Reading, published to coincide with the Finzi-Contini lecture, also from Yale University Press.  Mr. Manguel has written five novels, two of which are available in English: News from a Foreign Country Came and Stevenson under the Palm Trees.