Inspiring Older Readers
With Borges by Alberto Manguel
Born in Argentina but now living in Canada, Alberto Manguel has always been upfront about the debt he owes to Jorge Luis Borges: his identity as a writer and bibliophile has been shaped by the great man of Argentinian literature and he’s never tried to hide or escape from that overarching influence. If you want to understand why Manguel, a prodigious talent in his own right, feels so indebted to Borges, reading this slim tribute to his master will take you a long way down that path.
Packed into the one hundred or so pages of With Borges we get some part memoir, some part tribute and some part critical appreciation of the older writer’s work and, in providing that, Manguel tells us plenty about himself too. He was only 16 and working in a Buenos Aries bookshop in 1964 when Borges came in and the two ended by striking up an agreement that Manguel would read to the now blind author. Borges had started going blind from his mid-fifties and had come to rely on a constant string of young acolytes would go to his flat and read whatever they were required to – sometimes also taking dictation for new essays, poems or fictions.
Manguel’s memoir covers those years he spent with Borges and speculates on the character and genius of Argentina’s premier man of letters. Manguel is, naturally enough, in awe at his new responsibility and comes to venerate his subject but, thankfully, it’s not a total unquestioning loyalty – Borges was a man with his flaws as well as his greatness of heart. He could, it seems, be icy or even cruel and unforgiving when the mood took him or when someone fell foul of his temper.
But, in truth, you will choose to read this book to get a better sense of Borges the man rather than Borges the literary legend and that’s just what it delivers. There are some moments of real insight:
For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. Books restored the past. “In time,” he said to me, “every poem becomes an elegy.”
And there are also some surprises. This man who lived by the word and imagined paradise to be a library didn’t, as I have always imagined, have a flat stuffed with books. Instead a few discreet bookshelves with carefully selected titles, curated almost, and chosen with discrimination. His memory was his library and he had almost a photographic recall of poems, passages of text and almost everything he had ever written – down to the last comma or full stop.
Borges didn’t hold with the notion of literary genres and his reading ranged far and wide, driven by the ideas and the quality of writing rather than being constrained by notions of worthiness. He loved, we are told, to read crime fiction:
He loved detective novels. He found in their formulae the ideal narrative structures that allow the fiction writer to set up his own borders and to concentrate on the efficiency of words and images made of words. He enjoyed significant details. He once observed, as we were reading the Sherlock Holmes story "The Red-Haired League," that detective fiction was closer to the Aristotelian notion of a literary work than any other genre. According to Borges, Aristotle had stated that a poem about the labors of Hercules would not have the unity of the Illiad or the Odyssey, since the only uniting factor would be the single same hero undertaking the various labors, and that in the detective story, the unity is given by the mystery itself.
I realised as I was coming to the end of this little book that it had taken on the shape of an elegy, a tribute to a great man and his creations. But there is nothing sombre in this and its more of a celebration than a requiem but it certainly feels like Manguel’s personal message to the future about Borges and his legacy.
I can do nothing better than to end with this:
There are writers who attempt to put the world in a book. There are others, rarer, for whom the world is a book, a book that they attempt to read for themselves and for others. Borges was one of these writers. He believed, against all odds, that our moral duty was to be happy, and he believed that happiness could be found in books, even though he was unable to explain exactly why this was so. “I don’t know exactly why I believe that a book bring us the possibility of happiness,” he said. “But I am truly grateful for that modest miracle.” He trusted the written word in all its fragility, and through his example he granted us, his readers, access to that infinite library which others call the Universe.
Terry Potter
November 2018