Saturday, June 11, 2022

Albert Manguel / The Truth Is Out There, but Maybe Not in Here

The Truth Is Out There, but Maybe Not in Here

June 21, 2012

The novelist Edmund White has called biography “the most middle class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.”

The Argentine writer Alberto Manguel’s new novel, “All Men Are Liars,” is like an Off Broadway elaboration of Mr. White’s cutting observation. It’s a series of uncomfortable interviews with a would-be biographer in which little people approach a great writer’s corpse and leap on and off it like engorged fleas.

Mr. Manguel is among the most self-consciously literary people alive. His many nonfiction books have titles like “A History of Reading,” “The Library at Night” and “A Reader on Reading.” He is ardent and adept on this topic, but vaguely tiresome too. A small amount of reading about reading can go a long way.

As a young man in the 1960s Mr. Manguel was friendly with Jorge Luis Borges, and his slim memoir “With Borges” (2004) is a delight. “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library,” Borges said, an opinion Mr. Manguel probably does not have tattooed on his biceps, but I can imagine it there.

“All Men Are Liars,” which has been gently translated from the Spanish by Miranda France, is involving but static. It is Borgesian in tone — that is, it’s mostly cool and cerebral — and in its obsessions. These include unwritten novels, unreliable narrators, memory and exile. In a not untypical sentence, a character who happens to be named (metafiction alert) Alberto Manguel refers to his memory as “an agglomeration of brief, confused memories that seem contaminated by literature.”

The novel tells the story of a journalist named Jean-Luc Terradillos, who is working on a biography of a legendary, elusive and, yes, somewhat Borgesian novelist named Alejandro Bevilacqua, who died some 30 years earlier. Terradillos interviews the writer’s friends, lovers and enemies, and relates their tales, à la Studs Terkel, as a series of oral histories.

These stories clash mightily. Nearly everything about Bevilacqua’s life is up for grabs. Did he jump or was he pushed to his untimely death? Did he really write his one great novel, or is it the work of another man, a hideously ugly gentleman known as El Chancho (the Pig)? Expect no hints in this review. The simmering mysteries here are among the elements that keep you moving forward.

One of the best things about “All Men Are Liars” is the amount of fun Mr. Manguel is willing to poke at himself. After we hear the Alberto Manguel character’s account of Bevilacqua’s life, one of the great writer’s former lovers leaps in to tear him and his story apart.

Some of the habanero-hot abuse she dumps upon his head cannot be printed here. But she likens him to “a rather stupid dachshund.” She suggests his brain has been softened by “too much reading.” Romantically, she says, he was “all over me, like a bad rash.”

Humor is welcome in this short novel, which can verge on preciosity. This book contains a lot of lines — long on atmosphere, short on meaning — of the sort that only South American writers can get away with, or try to get away with. “Skin is a space that stands in for the world.” “No one in love ever writes.” “Detectives must be partly astrologers.”

You stick with “All Men Are Liars” for its interlocking secrets and for the way that Mr. Manguel, like a pilot in a stunt plane, pulls out of stalls and into gently beautiful runs. A quality of strangled desire is boiled down to the longing to "put a hand on the shoulder of a woman whose back reminds us of a long-lost friend." Bevilacqua has “saffron-colored fingers” from smoking, and wore “the habitual expression of a slaughtered ram.”

Mr. Manguel is more comfortable mediating between texts and ideas than between people, a limitation for a novelist. In this novel the character called Alberto Manguel declares that “when one takes a backward look at history, every decision, every move, each step contributes to the grand finale, complete with drums, glockenspiel and cymbals.” This novel could have used more glockenspiel, more cowbell.

But among the interesting ideas he toys with is the notion that lying, as one interviewee puts it, “is the great theme of South American literature.” Bevilacqua’s great novel is titled “In Praise of Lying,” and Mr. Manguel’s own book is surely, as much as anything else, a foxy intellectual treatise on mendacity and its discontents.

This book contains vivid praise for “minor works, those well-written and perfectly agreeable novels that make a journey shorter or while away the night hours.” Mr. Manguel’s novel is minor, for sure, but serious and worthy: its best moments imprint upon the mind.