Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Books, Reading, and the World (1998)

I was first introduced to Alberto Manguel's essays through The Library at Night, an homage to libraries private and public, and a rumination on reading including philosophy, history and literary criticism. Into the Looking-Glass Wood is similar in erudition and style but, much like the book from which he takes its name, its topics are all over the place. In this, you will see more of the man and perhaps a little less of the reader.

Libraries and books are my passion, so naturally I feel more drawn to a book where every essay is about that, and one theme builds on another in a natural progression. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy this collection: "St. Augustine's Computer," a rumination on the tension between books and technology, is worth the price of the book alone, and "Taking Chesterton at His Word" caused me to download a few of that author's books on my e-reader to rectify the fact that I've read nothing by him. It simply means that, as a different person with different interests, I was less than enthralled with some essays that had very little meaning or interest for me, personally. Another reader may appreciate more the essay on erotic literature or would have read Richard Outram to more ably connect with what Manguel had to say about him. So though I found it to be a mixed bag, I can fairly confidently recommend it to readers of books about books with the suggestion that there's something for everyone, and it's worthy of thought and discussion long after reading. ( )

“Alberto Manguel is one of my favorite authors, both for his ability to recognize great literature and his deft hand at assembling anthologies. In this collection of his essays he writes gracefully about some of my favorite authors including Jorge Luis Borges, G. K. Chesterton and Cynthia Ozick. But other topics are covered in this wide-ranging collection including "wordplay", aesthetics, and personal memories of reading - of these I especially enjoyed his comments on his childhood reading. All the essays share a love of reading and words that is the hallmark of Manguel's work. In doing so they provide a guide and commentary to fine literature and life. Good reading!” ( )

A collection of Manguel’s essays on books, reading, and the world.

I’m a big fan of Manguel. He is the consummate bibliophile and makes his living writing about books, book spaces, and book history. Every one of his titles is a gem from [The History of Reading] to [The Library at Night]. Comparatively, [Into the Looking-Glass Wood] is a much more fragmented work because it is an anthology, loosely connected together by quotes and themes from [Alice in Wonderland] (in case you couldn’t tell by the title).

In these essays Manguel talks about such things as the difference between terror and horror (“terror, which dilates the soul and excites an intense activity in all our senses, and horror, which contracts them, freezes them, somehow destroys them”), the future of books and computers, the state of gay literature, a retelling of the Book of Jonah as artistic parable, meditations on various South American writers and poets, the love life of Borges (who Manguel knew personally), the experience of having the teacher who taught him how to read well and also love books turn out to be a government spy who collaborated with the deaths of Manguel’s classmates, and also this:

“There is no doubt that more oppressed voices should and must be heard. There is no doubt that more Alice Walkers, James Baldwins, Mudrooroos need to come to the surface. But unless there is a whole new breed of readers to take those texts upon themselves, to read them in “new visions of how to live,” not much will change. It is on the readers that we must concentrate, not on the writers, on the readers who will make use of the text and “make something happen.” Unless this education of the reader occurs, no number of new voices will change anything…and if these readers learn to seek out, to interpret, to translate, to put texts into a variety of contexts, to transform the texts through multiple layers of meaning — if we, readers, train ourselves to do this — then we won’t need any voices to be silenced, because we will be able to make choices. A silenced voice, whether silenced voluntarily or not, never disappears.”

It’s an overly idealistic sentiment, I think, that ignores the structures of publishing and the publisher’s interests, but still. It’s a sentiment I can get behind. ( )

Some writers are so well-read, so erudite, so in love with the act and the meaning of writing and reading, so well-able to make the links between greatly different books, and so compassionate out of both personal experience and the experience of a lifetime of reading and thinking, that it almost makes one despair about one's own abilities, or maybe it acts as a goal, as a model to strive towards. Manguel is one of those people, and this book shows it.

The book is a collection of essays ranging across a broad range of topics from his appreciation of G.K.Chesterton, to his experiences as a teenager reading to Borges, to the human complexities of betrayal (a teacher whom he revered and who really opened to him the love of literature turns out, years later, to have been a spy and informer for the military regime in Argentina), to meditations on the power of prejudice, and thoughts on the value, the complexity, and the brilliance of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Here is Manguel on prejudice:

Once a prejudice is set up, it traps within its boundaries a heterogeneous group of individuals whose single common denominator is determined by the prejudice itself. The colour of one's skin, one's varying degrees of alliance to a certain faith, a certain aspect of one's sexual preferences, can and do become the obverse of an object of desire--an object of hatred. No logic governs these choices...

The group created by prejudice comes into existence not by the choice of the individuals forming it, but by the reaction of those outside it....Once limited and defined by this grouping, the quarry can be taunted, excluded from certain areas of society, deprived of certain rights, sometimes arrested, beaten, killed.

There are also, woven throughout the various essays, meditations and thoughts on the power of the written word, and the meaning of these words, these vocabularies that we use to describe the external world and our relationships to it, and to other people, and the limitations of those words. As Manguel notes:

A text allows in itself more freedom than we usually think possible, which is why governments are never really keen on literacy, and why it is usually writers and seldom deep-sea divers or stockbrokers who are imprisoned, tortured, and killed for political reasons.