A History of Reading. Alberto Manguel. New York: Viking, 1996. Pp. (unavailable) & 372. ISBN 0-6708-4302-4.

Reviewed by John Lindberg
Literacy Volunteers of Tucson, AZ, USA

This book puts me strongly in mind of Chateaubriand and his hauntingly entitled Memoires d'outre-tomb, for of all the attempts in this genre, Manguel has written the masterpiece in literary autobiography. His book is an argosy of wonders where we can safely trust ourselves to exotic ports-of-call speaking in many obscure tongues. We embark from Mesopotamia in 4000 BCE and after touching many points on the globe, we come ashore again at the Library of Congress in 1996. (See the timeline at the back endpaper.)

To put metaphor reluctantly aside, we note that the title claims to be a history, not the history. With this modest disclaimer, Manguel invites us on an extraordinarily learned cultural tour unimpeded by any narrow scholarly program. His discourse is not the list of necessary points to be covered expected of the exasperated epigone who wants to finish his spiel uninterrupted. To further slow and enrich the reading, the book provides many illustrations to show how reading has been a midwife to civilization since time out of mind, memoires d'outre-womb. We see the artwork of the ages giving us a view into domestic interiors where the book is more frequent than lapdogs and angels, even an intimate glimpse of a nude Mary Magdalen poring over a tome on her pillow perhaps in preparation for impending repentance.

Manguel also supplies ample notes, a list of plates, a bibliography, and many thematic quotations. Rest assured, this is a scholarly book...in the spirit of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy...with more learning and lore about books than one would ever have thought possible. But it is not a hobbyhorse like Northrup Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and Frances Yate's Art of Memory. It has no dogmatic, didactic point meant to set the world aright. It is indeed the intellectual autobiography of a reader's love affair with reading. Broadly chronological in plan, it weaves Manguel's life among books like primroses along a fence: how the books came into his hands, his continuously varied reaction to them, his gradually dawning realization that books and language and humans (not grimacing primates) came into being together like one of Teilhard de Chardin's cusping points.

If the book has more of a plan than a short review can convey and it surely does readers will work it out to suit themselves. As a humorous warning, the first section of the book, about 25 pages, is called "The Last Page," one short chapter to frame Manguel's whimsical purpose, complemented by a concluding last one-chapter section of equal brevity, "Endpaper Pages." After a moment's thought, if one has caught Manguel's quirky spirit, one remembers that endpapers have no text, so Manguel can hint that we should turn back to the "The Last Page," as it truly is, because it is what we read when we start re-reading.

The mass of the book, some 250 pages, divides into two sections, "Acts of Reading" and "Powers of the Reader," each half given ten chapters, with "Acts of Reading" the subjective confessions of an intensely self-conscious reader, and with "Powers of Reading" a platform for more public and social (one might even say socialistic) pronouncements on the role of books in public affairs. Without following any transparently discernible plan, the chapters echo or complement one another across the divide —"The Silent Reader" ("Acts") over against "The Symbolic Reader" ("Powers"); "Learning to Read" ("Acts") against "Forbidden Reading" ("Powers").

Instead of lining up these balanced chapters like boxers on a fight card, Manguel balances the parts of his book against the weight of its whole. Looking like a stork's nest ready to fall to pieces in the next high wind, the book, like the nest, endures through the years. I think part of the durability of the book owes its integrity to the early works of Carlyle, and Carlyle's ideas date back to Hegel. Notice the immanently pre-emptive Hegelian use of the terms "acts" and "powers," a dualistic dialectic that gives us new insights into the developing psyche. The constant fight between opposites, between empirical logic and the transcendental personality stirs up intellectual unrest and awakens the desire for intelligent argument. The tone and method of A History of Reading strongly recall Carlyle's essay "Characteristics" and his French

Revolution, which throw down the gauntlet to the powers that always be and always wish to exploit and sunder the weak. The balanced, wing-like progression is also very pronounced in Past and Present. Through all of its shifting and many-shaded veils, A History of Reading is a lucent lady whose form can be dimly seen behind the shadow-shifting.

"Oh, very well," you might pout, "but why has a book like this come to be reviewed in the pages of Literacy Across Cultures?" One answer I might give is that the book is a testament of faith in the power of words to make big social changes. It also has a psychological appeal to amateur readers who want to improve their status by developing and using critical thinking. The book is far too large and recondite to be used in the classroom and banged about in a backpack, but I think the book should become a teacher's Bible, read every day and the source of ever-evolving lesson plans. The teacher could exploit the chapters on "Learning to Read" and on "Forbidden Reading"; on "Picture Reading" and on "Private Reading" and "Reading within Walls." A History of Reading makes infinite suggestions about the conundrums in reading and writing, how we learn and how we build on what continuous freewriting teaches us about ourselves. All of those freshman composition handbooks, with their answer-provided quizzes, their tear-out sheet writing exercises, their banal theme suggestions, and their use of cartoons these are a horde of monkeys to this book, the true gem that Shylock would not have given for a wilderness of monkeys.