Into the Looking-Glass Wood

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Alberto Manguel was born in Argentina, but during the last 20 years has
lived in Canada, Switzerland, and London. A wide-ranging journalist,
anthologist, and general man of letters, he is best known for his
ambitious History of Reading. The present collection of essays is also a
product of his voracious appetite for the written word in all its forms.

Into the Looking-Glass Wood is an artful and unusual combination of
subgenres. First and foremost, it is a gathering of short pieces
produced over the past few years, but Manguel has combined them into a
book with its own unified structure. He has achieved this by ordering
them to form a kind of literary autobiography, beginning with his early
explorations of books and politics in Buenos Aires and extending to his
later role as a cosmopolitan citizen of the literary world. In addition,
he has linked the scattered pieces through section-epigraphs drawn
mainly from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass, complete with reproductions of the original Tenniel
illustrations. The paradoxical connections and distinctions between the
“real” world and the world of art reflect a recurrent theme that
continually surfaces in the individual essays.

There is much to enjoy here. His personal memoir of Jorge Luis Borges
is fascinating, and I was intrigued by his exploration of the two sides
of Mario Vargas Llosa. He also covers more general topics, such as
so-called “gay literature,” pornography, and the problems of
adequate translation, thus reminding us that the book is in many
respects the current generation’s equivalent to Robertson Davies’s A
Voice from the Attic (1960).

Manguel’s reading ranges widely. Though he focuses on the
late–20th-century mainstream, he includes an unexpected but cogent
appreciation of G.K. Chesterton, while Canadian literature is
represented by a most helpful and positive account of the neglected
poetry of Richard Outram.

Above all, like Davies’s A Voice, this is writing about writing by
someone who not only savors literary style but can also produce it—an
ability that, these days, cannot be taken for granted. A book for all
lovers of books.