In this book, Manguel traces the history of humanity’s adventure of collecting knowledge, from the Library of Alexandria to the 19th century art historian Aby Warburg’s library and from the Library of Congress in Washington to the virtual library called Google. As Turkish literature prepares to come under the spotlight with next week’s launch of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, Manguel speaks to Sunday’s Zaman about libraries and Turkish literature.The chapters of your book are titled “The Library as Myth,” “The Library as Space,” “The Library as Power,” or as an island, as a workshop, as a home, etc. But how would you personally define a library with a single word?
I suppose that if I had to define a library in a single word that word would be memory. Libraries are the repositories of our collective and individual experience, a monument against oblivion.
What in your view determines the value of a library, its contents, its volumes or the rarity of its treasures?
The value of a library, like its beauty, is in the eye of its reader.
You mention in your book that “if every library is in some sense a reflection of its reader, it is also an image of that which we are not and cannot be.” Is it possible to make an acquaintance with someone through his library?
Indeed, you can get to know someone through his library. I once suggested writing the biography of an unknown reader only by consulting the books in his or her library. What we choose or don’t choose, how we use our books, how we order them, how we treat them, what traces of ourselves we keep between their pages -- I think I could draw a portrait of someone through these clues.
Like Borges, do you imagine paradise as a library, too?
I don’t believe in the afterlife. Here and now, a library is paradise enough.
You have visited many libraries. Which impressed you most?
The library that most impressed me was Aby Warburg’s reconstructed library in Hamburg. It is elliptical in shape, so as not to have any corners that would artificially create sections or thematic boundaries, and it was organized according to the casual associations made by Warburg himself -- and which changed daily; a library in the image of its reader’s mind.
By saying, “our future paperless society,” you imply electronic technology threatens libraries. What do you think about the future of libraries? Are you optimistic?
I don’t think libraries or books are, in themselves, threatened. I think our intelligence is threatened. I think that we are in the midst of a worldwide intent to render us stupid so that we will be better consumers of economic and intellectual trash, whether it be fast food, pop literature or religious claptrap. I’m optimistic in the morning, pessimistic in the afternoon.
“To complete a library.” Is this a forlorn hope for mankind?
“To complete a library” is an impossible wish since, by definition, a library must always remain incomplete. A “complete” library is a dead library.
At the end of the book you thank a Turkish author, Enis Batur. What do you think about contemporary Turkish literature and poetry?
I was brought up on Nazım Hikmet’s poetry which, with that of Neruda and Ezra Pound, fed the imagination of my adolescence. A teacher of mine, fond of ancient narratives, introduced me to “The Book of Dede Korkut,” of which I now only remember the story of Prince Uruz taken prisoner and the strange epithets the characters use about each other, such as “Summit of my black mountain” or “Flood of my black river.” Then we read Yaşar Kemal and Orhan Kemal (I used to like the first better than the second; now, in my old age, I prefer the second to the first.) We also read the stories of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu and terrifyingly realistic ones of Sabahattin Ali, hesitatingly translated into Spanish. Other than Batur, in whose vast reading I find traces of my own and, of course, Orhan Pamuk, whom I started reading over a dozen years ago, I recently discovered a couple of women writers: Aslı Erdoğan, whose Brazilian adventure amused me (“La ville dont la cape est rouge”) and Latife Tekin, whose strange and haunting “Dear Shameless Death” I very much enjoyed.
You wrote “The History of Reading,” “Dictionary of Imaginary Places,” “Reading Pictures” and, in one sense, the history of libraries. What’s next?
I published this year a book on the relationship between who we think we are and the stories we tell in “The City of Words” and one on Homer, “The Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography.” I just finished a novel, “All Men Are Liars,” which I wrote in Spanish instead of my mother tongue, English.
