From Ulysses to Martin Guerre, the story of the delayed return speaks to the ineffectual wish that our stories will not all end tragically. Hoping that a disappearance is only a long absence, we continue to expect miracles, less impossible in our frightened minds than the finality of an unknown death.
In the Guardian, Alberto Manguel reviews Purgatory by Tomás Eloy Martínez.
In the Guardian Alberto Manguel reviews Pascal Mercier’s Perlmann’s Silence.
Close to the beginning of the novel, looking out over the Bay of Naples and its extraordinary light, Perlmann thinks: “The crucial thing would be this: to allow the appearance of this light to be everything, the whole of reality, and seek nothing behind it. To experience the light not as a promise, but as the redemption of a promise. As something at which one had arrived, not something that constantly aroused new expectations.”
Recommended.
At the New York Sun, Alberto Manguel reviews William Goldbloom Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel.
Book collectors might be presumed to be among the happiest of mortals. There, in the evening, they sit contentedly in soft easy chairs, beneath pools of warm lamplight, surrounded by their libraries — row after serried row of beautiful or rare volumes, all the great works of scholarship and the human imagination.
At the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night.