A Reader on Reading

My first library stood in a house in Tel Aviv, where my father was the Argentinean ambassador; my next library grew in Buenos Aires during my adolescence. Before returning to Argentina, my father had asked his secretary to buy enough books to fill the shelves of his library in our new house; obligingly, she ordered cartloads of volumes from a secondhand dealer but found, when trying to place them on the shelves, that many of them wouldn’t fit. Undaunted, she had them trimmed down to size and then bound in deep-green leather, a color which, combined with the dark oak, lent the place the atmosphere of a soft forest. I pilfered books from that library to stock my own, which covered three of the walls in my bedroom. Reading these circumcised books required the extra effort of supplanting the missing bit of every page, an exercise that no doubt trained me to read later the “cut-up” novels of William Burroughs.

The library of my adolescence contained almost every book that still matters to me today; few essential books have been added. Generous teachers, passionate booksellers, friends for whom giving a book was a supreme act of intimacy and trust helped me build it. Their ghosts kindly haunt my shelves, and the books they gave still carry their voices, so that now, when I open Isak Dinesen’s Gothic Tales or Blas de Otero’s early poems, I have the impression not of reading the book myself but of being read to out loud. This is one of the reasons I never feel alone in my library.

I left my books behind when I set off for Europe in 1969, some time before the military dictatorship. I suppose that had I stayed, like so many of my friends, I would have had to destroy my library for fear of the police, since in those terrible days one could be accused of subversion merely for being seen with a book that looked suspicious (someone I knew was arrested as a Communist for carrying with him The Red and the Black). Argentinean plumbers found that there was an unprecedented call for their services, since many readers tried to burn their books in their toilet bowls, causing the porcelain to crack.

In every place I settled, a library began to grow almost on its own. In Paris and in London, in the humid heat of Tahiti, where I worked as a publisher for five long years (my Melville still shows traces of Polynesian mold), in Toronto and in Calgary, I collected books and then, when the time came to leave, packed them up in boxes to wait patiently inside tomblike storage spaces in the uncertain hope of resurrection. Every time I would ask myself how it had happened, this exuberant accumulation of paper and ink that once again would cover my walls like ivy.

The library as it now stands, between long walls whose stones carry in some places the signature of their fifteenth-century masons, houses under a ceiling of weathered beams the remnants of all those previous libraries, including, from my earliest one, Grimm’s Fairy Tales in two volumes, printed in somber Gothic script, and a scribbled copy of The Tailor of Gloucester. There are only a few books that a serious bibliophile would find worthy: an illuminated Bible from a thirteenth-century German scriptorium (a gift from the novelist Yehuda Elberg), half a dozen contemporary artists’ books, a few first editions and signed copies. But I have neither the funds nor the knowledge to become a professional collector, and in my library shiny young Penguins sit happily side by side with severe-looking leather-bound patriarchs.