By Alberto Manguel
Yale University Press, £10.99
Alberto Manguel is a writer free of provinciality in both space and time. Born in Argentina, resident of Canada, he has lived in Tel Aviv and London and has travelled the globe extensively. Quest for knowledge has made him a lifelong reader of books of all types. As he nears his biblical three-score-and-ten, he has sought to map out the boundaries of what he has learned.
In a world and an era characterised by unstable values, it is admirable that an author should attempt what Somerset Maugham called a "summing up".
The guiding spirit of this in Western letters is no doubt Dante, and it is he whom Manguel takes as his Virgil. Woodcuts from a 1487 edition of La Commedia Divina precede the 18 sections of Manguel's book; quotes from Dante's text illumine the successive concerns of its chapters: "What is language?", "Who am I?" "What comes next?" And so on.
Dante was a political exile struggling to cope in a maelstrom of betrayal and strife, to suppress his own anger and judiciously to fix the greater collective morality. Manguel precedes each of his chapters with a personal reflection, but it is via the first person plural that he proceeds. A child of his time, he is concerned with "our" attitudes towards gender, money, art, death and much else. While he draws on the Talmud, Aquinas and medieval Arab scholars - thinkers unbound from the strictures of now - he also admits to having taken LSD in his youth, having experienced Auschwitz vicariously via Primo Levi and having recently suffered a stroke.
The fracturing of perception inherent in such experience is "part of the process", to quote another admirer of Dante, the Modernist Ezra Pound; but Manguel lacks the proscriptive agenda of that collaborator with Fascism, as of his Catholic precursor. He is at peace with his subjectivity and the gentle pursuit of his quest along the river-like course of his "curiosity". Life itself is a book he is written into and simultaneously writing, without urgency, yet with interest in reaching the end - if there is one. For there is no death in Dante, he sagely points out: all souls whom the poet encounters are "alive"in assigned places in Hell, Purgatory or Heaven awaiting the Day of Judgment.
Curiosity is a meditation on what is important. Like some of the work of Roberto Calasso, which it resembles, it is best taken as if part of a long, fascinating conversation with an individual whose erudition and humanity leave one largely content to listen while nursing one's own, parallel apprehensions.
