By Laura Smith

What Is Curiosity? How Do We Question? What Are We Doing Here? What Do We Want to Know? The award-winning Canadian writer Alberto Manguel explores these, and thirteen other equally poignant questions in his book Curiosity, published by Yale University Press (2015). A personal, historical, poetic, and imaginative journey, Manguel’s book invites readers to contemplate some of the questions that—since time immemorial—have driven human beings to display both their best and worst attributes.

Born in Buenos Aires, Manguel grew up in Tel-Aviv, and has since mostly resided in Europe and Canada. The experience of living in multiple countries as the son of a diplomat has inevitably influenced Manguel’s complex sense of identity and culture, his experience as a writer and, foremost, as a reader. For Manguel, the reader pierces through the constraints of a constructed linear experience of time and space and as such forms part of a collective imaginative fabric. Manguel explains that “the intimate conviction of readers is that there are no individually written books: there is only one text, infinite and fragmented, through which we leaf with no concern for continuity or anachronism or bureaucratic property claims” (277). The weaving of history, fiction, and personal memory reveals Manguel’s understanding of thought as a complex temporal and spatial shared geography. “Cartography,” writes Manguel, “is an art of mutual creation” (166). The participation of readers and writers in such a fabric testifies to the individual and shared life of human curiosity—Manguel’s questions are always posed in the first-person plural.

Each thematic chapter begins with a short personal reflection by Manguel. These are the author’s impressed memory-images: finding home in his imagination rather than his ever-changing address; the recognition of a special teacher igniting the spark of his intellectual curiosity; the obligation of sincerity to himself in the presence of his beloved dog; and the appreciation of his own inevitable death as the accelerated end to the story of his life. Against these brief peaks into our guide’s experience, our own sense of a dynamic time inevitably rises to the fore. We are transported to our hybrid real-and-imagined memories or dreams; those, for example, which are intimately intertwined with the pages of our favourite childhood books.

Guiding us in the exploration of these questions, Manguel incites the aid of another traveler: Dante in his, The Divine Comedy. Weaving an intricate narrative of juxtaposed historical, contemporary, personal, and universal, imaginative experience, Manguel’s philosophical questions are mirrored and explored through the adventures of Dante’s epic fourteenth-century poem. Like Manguel, who follows the poet on his quest through the three realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, we too follow the author of Curiosity into a forest of his making; exploring, in his footsteps, the paradoxes of human existence. In times of hardship, when words fail her, the writer Jeanette Winterson has remarked that she looks to the poets who have “deep-dived [the words] for [her] and brought them back to the surface.”[1] This allusion, perhaps to Hannah Arendt’s description of Walter Benjamin as a ‘pearl diver,’ rings true for the collected insights that Manguel’s book so generously offers.

Like Dante’s poem, there turn out to be few clear answers in Curiosity—this is fine and even must be so. “Nothing in the Commedia is only one thing,” writes Manguel (217). Rather, Curiosity is the journey of engaging the plurality of what drives our human quests, our modes of expression, and our troubled communication. For Manguel, human beings are born storytellers: “we imagine in order to exist,” he states (3). The inevitability of the failure to ‘answer’ fully to our curiosity, however, safeguards against extinguishing what Walter Benjamin described as the ‘living flame’ of a work of literature. Manguel explains:

There is an essential problem with which every writer (and every reader) is faced when engaging with a text. […] Our ability to grasp the text in all its multilayered complexity falls short of our desires and expectations, and we are compelled to return to the text once again in the hope that this time, perhaps, we will achieve our purpose. Fortunately for literature, fortunately for us, we never do. Generations of readers cannot exhaust these books, and the very failure of language to communicate fully lends them a limitless richness that we fathom only to the extent of our individual capabilities (7).

Manguel’s Curiosity is a reflection on difficult questions of a moral, ethical, and philosophical nature. Like all great guides, Manguel offers his readers the tools required to venture forth on a journey of their own making.

EVENT:

Alberto Manguel will be the keynote speaker at the Feestelijke Opening Kunstenbibliotheek, September 30, 2017, in Ghent.

KASK en Conservatorium / School of Arts Gent i.s.m. S.M.A.K., Design museum Gent, HISK, STAM en de Gentse Gidsen. Location: Campus Bijloke, Louis Pasteurlaan 2, 9000 Gent (gratis).

http://schoolofartsgent.be/nl/agenda-nieuws/agenda/feestelijke-opening-kunstenbibliotheek?eCat=7

External links:

The CBC’s host of Ideas Paul Kennedy interviews Alberto Manguel about his book Curiosity:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/alberto-manguel-s-curiosity-1.3016846

You can find a selection of Manguel’s essays on his personal website as well as a list of recommended readings – his 100 favourite books.

http://manguel.com/

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[1] Jeanette Winterson, talk from the 2010 Edinburgh Book Festival. https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/06/01/jeanette-winterson-edinburgh-book-festival-art/

By Jan Baetens

Peter Cole

Hymns & Qualms (Poems and Translations, New and Selected)

New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-0374173883

Internet culture has made copy and paste, sampling, “uncreative” or “unoriginal” writing, as Kenneth Goldsmith or Marjorie Perloff like to say – in short all kind of modern day versions of imitation – fashionable once again. However, the success of this way of writing should not prevent us from understanding that real imitation always involves a high degree of admiration and awe, but not fear, and this in many cases is the most challenging way to authentic poetic expression. Just as there is something like “deep time”, there is something like “deep theme” as well as “deep form” in poetry, and ambitiously imitative takes on writing are perhaps the best way to address these issues in both modern and sustainable ways.

Born in Paterson, as, among many others, the hero of Jarmusch’s Paterson (see my review: https://lesimpressionsnouvelles.com/une-semaine-dans-la-vie-du-poete/), Peter Cole is a deeply multilingual and multicultural poet, whose work in English is nourished by his knowledge and translations of Hebrew and Arabic. Dividing his time between New Haven (CT) and Jerusalem, he is the author of one of the most remarkable bodies of poetry in English today. His new book, an anthology of old and new work as well as old and new translations that reuses the title of a previous collection from 1998, seamlessly brings together texts from three different languages, many cultures (it would be absurd to reduce the Arabic and Hebrew traditions to monolithic wholes) and a wide range of periods (the book contains translations of texts from late antiquity and the 11^th century till very most contemporary creations). In that sense, it is much more than a personal anthology offering wonderful examples of the modern lyric, which in a very accessible but always sharply formulated language blurs the boundaries between the local and the global, the personal and the political, the descriptive and the meditative. The most striking feature of this multi-voiced and multi-layered book is its incredible unity. Not as the result of a modern and subjective streamlining, but as the outcome of a poetic inquiry into what authors, languages, cultures, and epochs may have in common in spite of their welcome differences, the very discovery of what humans share, which only poetry can teach them that it exists.

Hymns & Qualms is a once in a lifetime book for his author, a work of great maturity one can only publish every two, three decades. Readers, don’t miss it!

By Jan Baetens

Jean-Christophe Menu

Krollebitches. Souvenirs même pas en bande dessinée

Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2017, 176 p.

978-2-87449-456-7

 

Jean-Christophe Menu is one of the major voices of alternative comics in France, both as an author and as the co-founder of L’Association, the leading publisher of French comix in the period of his 20 years editorship (he resigned a couple of years ago). He is above all a living paradox: the angry young man of the French bande dessinée scene, he is also the holder of a PhD on the subject (moreover an excellent one, frequently used and quoted in academic research: La Bande dessinée et son double, 2011); the living example of authentic visual thinking, he is also an author who does not make any real distinction between his drawings and his writings. His new book is the perfect yet open synthesis of all these forces and tendencies.

“Krollebitches” (literally: small curls) is a neologism coined by the Belgian comics artist Franquin that refers to what in English is called “emanata”, the small but highly significant symbols that can surround characters in comics and that represent either a movement (speed lines) or certain states of mind (surprise, interrogation, bewilderment, etc.). These “krollebitches” are one of the most typical features of comics as an art of drawing and as such they are the perfect title for a book that aims at disclosing both the specificity of comics as a visual language and the passionate relationship between maker and work as well as between work and reader.

Krollebitches is a vital contribution to comics culture for many reasons. In the first place, it is an autobiography of one of the decisive figures of alternative comics of the last 25 years, who succeeded almost single-handedly to bridge the gap between underground comix and traditional publishing without ever abandoning the creative vitality of the punk spirit. Autobiography in comics has become a cliché nowadays, due to the autobiographical turn of the graphic novel and the rising market of interview books. Krollebitches, however, offers something else: not a graphical novel, but a real text, complemented –rather than illustrated– by a permanent flow of perfectly appropriated emanate (the author himself has been in charge of the book’s layout, which is a stunning example of clever layout). Moreover, the book is not the work of an interviewer or a ghostwriter, but of the artist himself, who proves to be as efficient and surprising a writer as a visual artist. In addition, Krollebitches does not claim to tell it all: it focuses on the formative years of Menu, and one will notice that these years start early since the author was already reading comics before he could actually read. In that sense, the book is an astonishing but very authentic and convincing tribute to some old masters –I already mentioned Franquin, but Menu’s knowledge of the field is breathtaking and his tastes are much more eclectic than one might suppose.

Yet next to the documentary value of the book, which is an ideal introduction to the world of comics as seen through the eyes and the personal experience of a great artist, Krollebitches is also an exceptionally well written piece of literature. Menu is in perfect command of his very direct as well as sober style, which exemplifies the surprisingly classic ideal of “aptness”, and this applies to everything in this book: vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, word and image interaction, touch and feel of the object.

By Jan Baetens

On: Frederick Luis Aldama, Long Stories Cut Short. Fictions From the Borderlands (Tucson: Arizona University Press, 2017, ISBN: 970816533978)

Long Stories Cut Short. Fictions From the Borderlands is an amazing book and probably also the most direct, honest and useful book that I’ve recently read. Content-wise it looks very simple: a collection of “flash fictions” (ranging from the one-sentence fictions à la Augusto Monterroso to very dense, but always very legible, one or two page stories) on the “Latino experience” (that is the bilingual and bicultural life of those crossing all kind of borders from South to North in a multimedia and multilayered world), without any concession to the naïve and sentimental utopias that continue to litter our perception of the harsh reality. Aldama’s prose is in your face and Long Stories Cut Short is amongst the most depressing books one can imagine. A welcome reply to all romantic views on the land of milk and honey (“She might be able to go home, the doctor announces. /He can only think: Hurry up and die.”, p. 171).

At the same time, the book is a great example of what literature today can or should be: an attempt to shape –which signifies: reshape–  modern life with modern means. Aldama thus brings into dialogue form and content: his borderland prose is not a matter of themes, it is also a matter of textual materiality, his book offering all fictions in two versions (English and Spanish, with no hierarchy between – they are independent and equal versions of each other) as well as in two media (the Chilean Mapache Studios have illustrated in comics style for most of the stories, and this image becomes a mirror story itself). Moreover, the author –a well-known specialist of narrative studies, who has the courage to start writing himself (like many others, he could have made a career by writing fifty articles on free indirect style in Jane Austen) – manages to change the genre he explores. His flash fictions do not only push the genre beyond its usual limits (the diversity of tones, styles, techniques and scopes is impressive), they also offer a complete rethinking of the nature of flash fiction once it appears in a collection. For Long Stories Cut Short is much more than a book of very short stories, it is an encyclopedia of the borderland experience. It does not rely on simple tricks such as the recurrence of characters and places in various stories –an easy way to bridge the gap between the part and the whole–but rather it manages to build a world in which the parts do not fit together –as they don’t in the real world either.