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The writer and bibliophile, who on the 12th of this month signed a protocol with the Lisbon City Council to donate his library, made up of some 40 thousand volumes to the city, told Lusa in an interview about his dreams and projects for this future library public, which should be physically ready in 2023, in “pessimistic” calculations.
This literary collection will make up the future Center for the Study of the History of Reading (CEHL), of which Alberto Manguel will be director, and which will be located in the Palace of the Marquis of Pombal, on Rua das Janelas Verdes, near the National Museum of Ancient art. .
Among the members of the Honor Council of the future study center are writers such as Olga Tokarczuk, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Chico Buarque and Tolentino de Mendonça.
Alberto Manguel refuses to have a passive role as director, because he believes that a library, especially a public one, has a civic function, of educating citizens.
“We are living a tragic moment in our history, in which democratic concepts are crushed and lies are imposed through technologies, which are excellent, but which can serve for these infamies. The library can give citizens new faith in their intelligence. We have to tell readers, especially young people, that they are smart, that they should give their opinion, ask, question, be a bit anarchist. The library can be a kind of center of intellectual subversion ”, he said, showing himself convinced that it will be.
The work has already begun, even though the books are currently crossing the Atlantic, from Montreal to Lisbon, and the space that will house the library needs works and adaptations that should take two and a half years.
“I am planning events for the end of this year or the beginning of next. Margaret Atwood wants to come to Lisbon to talk, Roger Chartier wants to bring students to Lisbon, to do a seminar, Maryanne Wolf is very interested in reading problems and dyslexia, and we will have that in Lisbon. I want to organize readings by Portuguese actors who read texts by novelists, poets, theater authors, about children’s reading ”.
As future director of CEHL, Alberto Manguel has plans to expand his activity, with the creation of a network between the library and the José Saramago Foundation, Casa Fernando Pessoa and the different literary festivals that take place in the country.
Internationally, I would like to “create a relationship between this center and the Gutenberg Center in Germany, whose former director will be part of the honor committee, or the Library of Congress in Washington, whose director is part of the committee, and so on. ”.
Basically, Alberto Manguel designs a library in Lisbon, which will be Portuguese, but also international, because a “library takes the identity of the readers who use it” and will be used by researchers from all over the world, since “the honor committee that It has been trained and has African, French, Argentine, Spanish, Colombian researchers… it is a place that brings together different nationalities, but they are all readers ”.
“We will have researchers who study the relationship between music and musical reading with the word, we will create a musical background, which was not in my library. I am also in talks with a Portuguese researcher, Daniel Melo, who has worked a lot in public reading and public libraries in Portugal, and we will have a section on reading in Portugal. There will be a section of foreign novels about Portugal, or that take place in Portugal ”.
Alberto Manguel added that “in the center of the library will be all the books on the history of reading, history of books and libraries, autobiographies of booksellers and librarians, and more technical books on the teaching of reading, this will be the heart of library”.
When he wrote the book “Packing my library” (Tinta-da-China), in which he describes the painful task of dismantling and boxing up his library, which for 15 years occupied a former presbytery in France, Alberto Manguel was writing the “obituary” of his library, and now he confesses that there was a time when he thought that books would end up in boxes, disappear, be sold and the library would never exist.
“But it is a lesson, that one should not lose hope, and now I feel like Lazaro’s sisters, who believed that he was dead and saw him come out of the tomb.”
This “resurrection” of the library – which he says is the last dream he wanted to realize – was due to the “generosity” of the Lisbon Chamber, which gave him a space in exchange for the donation of his library.
However, donating the library was something that seemed impossible a few years ago. Yes, he writes in the book, when he says that his school library had a notice that said “These books are not yours: they belong to everyone”, and then he adds: “My library could never have a notice like this. For me it was an absolutely private place, which surrounded me and at the same time reflected me ”.
Now, faced with the imminence of not having a library again, he was forced to review this conviction and transfer the private to the public domain, which represents a “necessary detachment.”
“When it was my private library, it was my identity, my autobiography, now it will be the autobiography of all the other readers, it goes from the private to the public,” he said, adding: “There is a different relationship, from a monologue that becomes in dialogue, a private love that becomes a public love, and that is what I want the library to be ”.
For Alberto Manguel, to make public a library that represented his “autobiography”, because it was built of personal associations, affections and memories – the writer rejects the epithet of bibliophile, because his collection is of sentimental value, without funds or knowledge of a professional collector : it was like exposing your privacy.
However, he acknowledges that it was a “voluntary and necessary opening: if things had been different in France, I always believed that I would die in my library”.
For this reason, and having had to abandon what he called “paradise”, Alberto Manguel was saved with the offer of Lisbon and admits that he chose this city, simply because the city chose him.
“No other country, no other city has made me this offer. Lisbon was the only city that proposed to bring my library here and install it in very generous terms ”, she acknowledged, but expressing her satisfaction for being one of the“ most civilized and most cultural cities in the world, and with a very strong history . to the history of books and libraries ”.
Regarding the cost of all this undertaking – in charge of the local authority – Manguel claims to be completely unaware, but he is already negotiating support and patronage, inspired by the work he did in the National Library of Argentina, as its director.
