Alberto Manguel
A History of Reading, published in 1996, is a work of nonfiction in which Manguel explores the act of reading across cultures and centuries, tracing how humans have engaged with the written word from ancient times to the present day.
Alberto Manguel was born on March 13, 1948, in Buenos Aires, and was educated at the National School of Buenos Aires. He went on to work as a writer, translator, essayist, editor, and literary editor, producing work in multiple languages — English, Spanish, French, German, and Swedish among them. A citizen of both Argentina and Canada, he has operated across a genuinely international literary landscape, and his multilingual range shaped the breadth of perspective that runs through his nonfiction.
Over the course of his career, Manguel received recognition from several institutions and award bodies. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also received the Alfonso Reyes International Prize, the Prix Médicis essai — a French award for essay writing — and the Prix Formentor. That last prize, the Prix Formentor, stands as one of the more recent concrete markers of the esteem in which his body of work has been held by the international literary community.
Quotes by Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel's insights on:
We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader.
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear. If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world’s essential, joyful muddle.
And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had ‘walked over our grave,’ as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us – the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.
Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading – once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive – is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked...
Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word “text” unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?
The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me – me and every other reader – by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I’ll never read.
This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don’t know that I am their reader.