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This volume takes bibliophilia to new heights. It is an erotic prose poem that celebrates passionate encounters with books over many years, a kind of Joy of Sex dedicated to the act of reading. The author, Alberto Manguel, is that increasingly rare thing, a man of letters. He is not a professor or someone who merely “works in publishing;” he does not owe allegiance to a narrow discipline or an industry. Rather, he is an independent intellectual, a private scholar whose only allegiance is to Respublica literaria. The son of an Argentine diplomat, he is a cosmopolitan who has lived and worked all over the globe, including such unexpected places as Tahiti. Manguel is also at home in several languages (and their cultures). He is the deeply learned author of several books, including two novels, as well as the best selling A History of Reading . A lover of both the idea of the book and the sensuous physicality of actual books, he now lives with his partner, Craig Stephenson, in a former presbytery in France, surrounded by a beautiful library of over 30,000 books. Clearly, this is a reader who was born to write a reader on reading.
The book is comprised of Manguel's incidental articles and speeches from the last few years. Thus, it reads as a collection of short essays on a wide variety of subjects, but there are certain topics he comes back to a number of times. Among these, libraries, the history of reading, the question of what it means to be Jewish, Argentine politics, and certain writers (especially Borges, Cervantes, and Lewis Carroll) are prominent. Such a stripped down version of the book's contents fails to capture the charm, lucidity, and warmth with which Manguel endows every subject he touches.
For instance, in treating Borges, he provides interesting readings of some of the more mysterious stories, but it is Borges, the flawed human being, who interests Manguel. Summing up 90 years of his hero's life as a romantic search for a perfect woman, Manguel notes that B