Last week, I traveled to the Queen City to participate in the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA). For 40 years, this event has brought together readers and writers from around the world for ten days around what unites them: the love of stories, reading and books. It was for me a first foray into TIFA where I was invited to talk about the English translation of one of my novels.
After dropping off my suitcase at the hotel, I meet Michel Jean coming out of the elevator. Talk chatter chatter in the half-darkness of the hall, when suddenly, in front of us, an elegant gentleman passes in a sky blue suit, wearing a pale gray fedora, red laces on his shoes, not very tall, well-trimmed beard and presenting a vague resemblance to Freud: Alberto Manguel.
As a reminder, Manguel is the author of several works devoted to the world of books, including A history of reading, translated into around thirty languages. This particular former reader of the Argentine writer who became blind Jorge Luis Borges has been, in recent years, director of the National Library of Argentina, in Buenos Aires, his hometown. Today he directs a research center on the history of reading in Lisbon, his favorite city in the world. Perhaps because it houses its monumental library? Say that this collection of 40,000 books almost landed in Quebec…
First observation upon arrival at the TIFA site: we are far from the soulless, windowless convention centers and other arenas transformed into book festivals. Situated on the shores of peaceful Lake Ontario, the Harbourfront Center is both an art gallery and a space with rooms of varying sizes. Outside, we relax on the Boxcar terrace sipping a glass of local wine, or we swing while breathing in the seafront air.
Inside, you can admire the sculptures from a current exhibition, sit for a moment with a public writer harnessed to a typist, then stroll through the pretty pop-up bookstore before going back up to the authors’ lounge. I see Manguel at a table, but I am too intimidated to approach this giant. I head towards the studio where the meeting will take place with him and a young Portuguese writer and translator, João Reis, author of a book with a magnificent and resonant title in its English version: The Devastation of Silence.
The room is not huge or full — it must be said that it is a Monday. A great privilege to be able to spend a moment with the great man of letters in such an intimate context. The moderator opens the discussion with a question whose candor surprises me: “Where do the subjects of your novels come from? “. Manguel is categorical: “Everything I write comes from what I have read. » Son of a diplomat, the writer spent his childhood in Tel Aviv in Israel. “Until I was eight or nine years old, I didn’t have many friends, but there were books everywhere around me. They were the ones who taught me how to tell the world and gave me a glimpse of everything I was going to experience next, not without a feeling of déjà vu — of déjà vu. »
As the evening progresses, I notice that to the host’s questions, the writer prefers to answer from his perspective as a reader. Listening to him, one almost has the impression that talking about writing—at least his own—does not interest him. It is the more humble posture of the reader that makes him loquacious. Did he not write, in the introduction to his History of reading (Actes Sud, 1998), “I could perhaps live without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading? At one point in the evening, he offers this dynamic definition of literature: “writing supplemented by reading and which cannot exist without it”.
During questions from the audience, a woman brings up the concept of saudade, this pretty Portuguese word that Manguel describes as a “melancholic state that rejoices in its melancholy”. She asks him: “You who have read a lot, and lived a full life in several countries, what are you nostalgic for? “. Outside, an indigo velvet twilight falls over Toronto, the city where Manguel spent twenty years of his life — he also has Canadian nationality. “All readers know that a story that never ends would be a terrible thing. I am 75 years old; I can see the end approaching… And I sometimes feel nostalgic when I think back to the chapters that I enjoyed reading. »