NON FICTION. ALIANZA, 2017. 200 PAGES
When early this century Alberto Manguel set up a library of 35,000 books in a former presbytery in a village in the Loire Valley, he thought that he'd found a home for his books, and himself, after years of wandering around the world. But it wasn't to be. Life turned out differently and his books are now languishing in storage in Montreal.
An inverted mirror-image of Walter Benjamin's famous text, "Packing my Library" is almost a manifesto, a vehement defence against the threat of oblivion as represented by the empty bookshelves: the result of dismantling the idiosyncratic organizational system that the author of so many texts about the pleasure of reading had made into his personal intellectual atlas.
However, there is not a hint of resignation in this book. Rather, as Alberto Manguel says in his ‘Elegy and ten digressions', it is a celebration of the lucidity and wisdom of the library that continues to exist in the reader's mind, the sacredness of the word and the interplay of associations and memories that the packed-up books evoke.
This is a new adventure for the reader by an author who won the Formentor Prize this year, whose compensation for losing his personal library was the directorship, as of June last year, of the National Library of Argentina.
«A short but delicious tale»
El confidencial. Spain
«The melancholy act of packing up his library in France inspires one of Alberto Manguel's most intimate works to date»
Babelia- El País
PUBLISHED BY: Spain ALIANZA | Arabic DAR AL SAQI | Brazil COMPANHIA DAS LETRAS | Canadá LEMÉAC EDITEUR | China THE COMMERCIAL PRESS | Croatia FRAKTURA | English world rights YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS | France ACTES SUD | Germany FISCHER | Italy EINAUDI | Korea THENAN | Mexico ALMADIA | Poland WYDAWNICTWO DRZAZGI | Portugal TINTA DA CHINA | Romania NEMIRA | Serbia GEOPOETIKA | Turkey YAPI KREDI
INTERVIEW, 2022
COOKBOOKS, 2021
NARRATIVE ESSAY, 2019
Monsieur Bovary (and other loyal...
COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES, 2018
NON FICTION, 2015
El regreso de Ulises (illustrate...
ILLUSTRATED TEXT, 2014
The Traveler, the Tower, and the...
NON FICTION, 2013
NON FICTION, 2011
NON FICTION, 2010
NON FICTION, 2010
ANTHOLOGY, 2009
NOVEL, 2008
NON FICTION. 2006
ESSAY, 2006
NOVEL, 2006
NOVEL, 2006
NON FICTION , 2004
NON FICTION, 2004
Stevenson under the Palm Trees
NOVEL, 2002
NON FICTION, 2000
ESSAYS, 1998
NON FICTION, 1998
NON FICTION, 1996
News from a foreign country came
NOVEL, 1991
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places
NON FICTION, 1980
Provença 293, 4-1 - 08037 · Barcelona +34 93 832 70 88 · · Member of ADAL