Through the page’s prism

A Reading Diary

Alberto Manguel

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 210 pp., $22

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Stevenson Under the Palm Trees

Alberto Manguel

Canongate U.S.: 106 pp., $18

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A few years ago, Alberto Manguel, the author of “A History of Reading,” decided to reread some books. He noticed, not for the first time, “how their many-layered and complex worlds of the past seemed to reflex the dismal chaos of the world I was living in.” So he decided to keep a record of the moments when a passage from Cervantes or a single line of Goethe’s seemed to rise from the page and transfigure his own thoughts, overheard conversations or the increasingly bad news reported in the media. “A Reading Diary” is the result, and if after a time it seems Manguel couldn’t stop keeping this diary, it shouldn’t be surprising that a reader wouldn’t want it to end.

Writers always have to carry off a dual hat-trick of truthfully rendering the messes people, families and cultures make of themselves, while doing so with a control, organizational lucidity and wisdom strong enough to keep the mayhem on the page from swamping the reader’s imagination. Circumstances make Manguel aware of this quickly, for the year in which he keeps the diary starts in June 2002. The aftershocks of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan and America’s preparations to storm Iraq saturate not only Manguel’s diary pages but the quotes from dozens of authors he cites. Although one book dominates each month of entries, Manguel admits, “I think in fragments,” and so bits of other literature, biography and history also swarm through his notes. A reflection on Don Quixote’s faith will be interrupted by Andre Gide’s comment on the assassination of Gandhi: “It is as if God had been defeated.”

A good part of the engaging quality of this book is its refusal to play at being “canonical,” to participate in any of the interminable debates over what is great in literature and what’s not (and why). At no point does Manguel set himself up as an arbiter of the Great Books, and although he adores making lists (the best is about books he’d like to own for “sentimental reasons” such as “Alice Liddell’s copy of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ ” and the “copy of ‘Metamorphosis’ that Kafka gave to his father”), a long expounding on the classics will not be found here.

Manguel is after the books he has read that cling to him for reasons he doesn’t fully understand. “Don Quixote’s” juxtaposition of satire, even cruelty, with the determined faith of its title character doesn’t just make him laugh: It makes the violence happening in the world feel closer and more dangerous. He can’t get away from the moment when Chateaubriand describes in his memoirs arriving in America and purchasing a few items from a young black street seller, remarking, “It was a slave who welcomed me to the land of freedom.” Manguel rereads Wells’ “The Island of Doctor Moreau” not just for that author’s skill at providing uncanny scenes and characters but for Wells’ sense of the horror in civilization -- from which, whether on a “lost” island or in the middle of teeming London, there is no escape.

On the first anniversary of Sept. 11, Manguel puts down his reading for a long phone call with his daughter who, from Canada, had watched the fall of the twin towers on TV and described what was happening to her father. He repeats the story of a reader trapped in a bookstore near the World Trade Center: “[S]ince there was nothing to do but wait for the dust to settle, he kept on browsing through the books, in the midst of the sirens and the screams.” As Manguel rereads “Kim,” “The Wind in the Willows,” “The Pillow Book” and other books seemingly remote from present-day headlines, dismay, disbelief and finally anger interrupt his meditations.

There is no American literature featured in the monthly reflections; the only recent American novel Manguel mentions is Thomas Harris’ “Hannibal” (“The hero-monster with no purpose in life except his own self-satisfaction: Has that character been created at any other time in history?”). But Manguel’s discomfort over the coming Iraqi invasion is not knee-jerk. Nonetheless, when it clicks with his love and respect for writing, the result is withering: Noting that the Bush administration has “recruited prominent American writers to explain the United States to Muslim countries,” Manguel writes that “at all times great writers have lent their voices to political propaganda.” Yet he recoils at the possibility: “It still astonishes me to see with what naivete writers as intelligent as [Robert] Pinsky allow their work to be used by their government.” The outrage is over the appropriation of words that are supposed to be freely thought, written and open to any mind’s interpretation (propaganda, of course, claims a narrower purpose). Finally it becomes clear that this year of diarizing over his reading has been a reassertion of that freedom for Manguel.

It should be no surprise that such a writer, in such a time, can’t confine himself to nonfiction: During this period, Manguel wrote “Stevenson Under the Palm Trees.” Written around the same time as “A Reading Diary,” it’s a murder mystery (and Manguel treasures genres) that intersects history and imagination (the protagonist is Robert Louis Stevenson, who did live in the Samoan setting of the story). The European rearing and mind-set of the writer-hero and the exoticism of the setting begin to come together in sinister ways. To describe more would be to give away the story. Though this is a brief one, it nonetheless packs a punch strong enough to offer another explanation for Manguel’s lifetime of reading and reflecting on reading: It’s the only way your own writing can ever get good enough for readers of the future to care about it. *