One feverish night, Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed of a terrifying “hue of brown”. It was the latest visitation from the Night Hag, his term for the horrors that had haunted him from early childhood, and which he exorcised through his writing. From this simple colour dream, Alberto Manguel writes, Stevenson crafted his nightmarish novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Manguel has so often referenced the Scottish author in his work (not least in his 2003 novella Stevenson Under the Palm Trees) that it’s tempting to see him as a sort of Hyde to his Jekyll: unworldly, sickly and creatively possessed in a way that the urbane Argentinian-born bibliophile could never be.
One of the world’s great readers, whose finest work has been about the writing of others, Manguel faced his own worst nightmare three years ago when – defeated by “sordid” French bureaucracy – he and his partner left the medieval village presbytery that had been their home for the last 15 years for a tiny flat in Manhattan. That meant packing up his precious library of 35,000 books in the knowledge that he might never see them all together again. “Packing,” he writes, “is an exercise in oblivion. It is like playing a film backwards, consigning visible narratives and methodological reality to the regions of the distant and unseen, a voluntary forgetting.”
This nightmare, like Stevenson’s, has produced a book – a slim, fragmentary meditation on the power of reading and the importance of libraries. The form Manguel has chosen is an essay interrupted by 10 “digressions”, which ramble anecdotally across time and space. In one, he recalls the syphilitic knight Pedro de Mendoza, who sailed to South America in 1536 under instructions from the emperor Charles I to set up a Spanish colony, taking with him not only 13 ships and 2,000 men, but “seven volumes of medium size bound in black leather” which were to become the continent’s first library.
The books in this founding library, Manguel writes, communicate an eclectic, generous conception (probably unconscious, certainly not explicit) of what a new city should be. They include a philosopher of a faith that was not Mendoza’s own (Erasmus), poets in tongues other than Spanish (Petrarch and Virgil) and a fellow explorer from another age and another culture – a 13th-century Franciscan monk whose travels produced a history of the Mongol people. For Manguel libraries are not simply repositories of learning but nerve centres of civilisation, where the conscious and the subconscious outpourings of centuries teem together in a platonic mirror of life that may also, paradoxically, be humanity’s fullest iteration of itself. Yet, in another digression, he points out that “every book confesses the impossibility of holding fully on to whatever it is that our experience seizes. All libraries are the glorious record of that failure.”
Where does this leave Manguel, who has constructed his own autobiography through successive accounts of his reading life? The son of a diplomat, his childhood was itinerant, and his passion for books was informed and encouraged by reading aloud to the blind Jorge Luis Borges; after emigrating to Canada and later to France and the US, he has now found his way back to Argentina as director of the national library (a job once held by Borges himself).
“My story remains elusive because it is never the definitive story,” he tells us, and in one curious anecdote this turns out to be true. He is rehearsing a familiar list of his childhood reading when he arrives at HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, “which my friend Lenny Fagin gave me for my 10th birthday”.
This is striking because, elsewhere, he has written that the green-bound Everyman copy was a present for his 13th birthday, which he had read in a quiet country house his parents had rented for one “lucky summer” when he had also made several other life-changing literary discoveries.
A book discovered at 10 is very different from one encountered at 13 and one would expect the bibliographer to file it correctly, even if the life-writer misremembers. So is this simply carelessness, the result of separation from his books? Or could it be an act of psychological sabotage, whether conscious or unconscious? I’d like to think it is the latter: that the sophisticated, globe-trotting Manguel has been ambushed by his own demons. For, as he tells us, he never wanted to be a nomad and has had to work to control his grudges.
It doesn’t seem entirely fanciful to see this conflict embedded in the structure of his book. On first reading, I felt jostled and distracted by the digressions. Reread as two separate texts, it appears that Manguel has used them to accommodate his own Jekyll and Hyde: the mature and philosophical director of a library, and the furious child who won’t allow anyone to borrow his books, and who grabs at monsters from literature to express a deep sense of injury. Not for nothing was the terrifying golem of Jewish folklore, cited here by Manguel, described by a first-century rabbi as “an unarticulated lump”.
• Packing My Library is published by Yale. To order a copy for £14,44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
