Book Reviews

Chaotic Fancies

Alberto Manguel (Author)
The Library at Night. Knopf Canada
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Reviewed by Joseph Jones

Anthologist Alberto Manguel has turned from writing about reading to writing about aggregations of readable objects. Where a collection policy sets no boundaries, any such aggregation can be taken for a library. A leitmotif of nighttime fosters a mood that follows whims with “a lightheartedness verging on insouciance.”

This book offers fifteen ways of looking at a library as some analogue, aspect, or attribute. The second and longest section is “The Library as Order.” Before anything else, order means the arrangement of books on shelves, a matter encountered by Manguel in dealing with his own book collection. To a librarian, his ruminations seem confused. Imprecise terminology wanders without charm among issues of classification, notation, subject headings, and bibliographic description. Pride of place is given to an oxymoronic concept of “alphabetical classification.” (The strength of arrangement by alphabet is its arbitrary and predictable sequence, a sequence that lacks any of the semantic content implied by classification.) Not intended as a manual of library science, The Library at Night should have stayed farther from that sphere. What is it then? An assemblage of anecdotes and images, a constellation of associations, a field for browsing. What strikes any particular reader will be as idiosyncratic as the book itself. Two of the items that stuck in my memory were a mention of oasis city book collections along the road to Mecca and an account of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library.

Over a tenth of the volume is devoted to providing attribution for the bits of content, as well as access to those bits: 367 endnotes, three pages of image credits, and an index. This apparatus bestows an aura of scholarship. Where an endnote attaches to a passage, the reader can return to a source. Such proves not to be the case for the doubly dubious claim that Varro wrote “an unreliable handbook of library science, quoted approvingly by Pliny.” Another frustration attends an image captioned “ground plan of the Pergamon library.” The credits lead only to “author’s collection,” yet the same plan appears as a better graphic in Lionel Casson’s Libraries in the Ancient World (2001). More than two dozen other illustrations also trace back to that murky authorial collection.

Apart from particular libraries (not least that of Manguel himself, which gets eleven lines in the index), topics are unpredictable. The author revels in this unpredictability as he handles his books, picking up this and that, reading here and there. Sensibility and atmosphere aim to provide continuity and to carry the load of a larger structure. Even at the level of detail, treatment can seem limited. That Rabelais may have been the first to invent an imaginary library typically remains an incidental comment. Why Rabelais might occupy that position in the early days of printing remains unconsidered. Given the conceit of the freedom conferred by the night, it is surprising not to find a mention of Aulus Gellius, an ancient who called his gleanings Attic Nights. In a sense, this and anything else not found in the book may secretly reside in the section “The Library as Shadow,” a realm of absence where a “forbidden or forgotten double” can be sought.

A curious and contradictory kind of credo frames the volume. The foreword opens with the exposition of a practical nihilism: “Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose.” The final section, “The Library as Home,” leads into a postscript that invokes “the suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp.” This evocative conclusion unfurls echoes of Genesis as it sails past paradox into meaninglessness. In the heterodoxy of the darkened library, chaos amounts to god.

This compendium of library lore gathers and arranges materials, sketches out topics, and trips along to the next diversion. What any individual reader perceives in the resulting panorama will depend on that reader’s own acquaintance with the contents of books and libraries. In other words, this book about The Library will act as a mirror.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #193 (Summer 2007), Canada Reads. (pg. 163 - 164)

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