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Alberto Manguel
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The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor (Material Texts) Hardcover – Download: Adobe Reader, July 19, 2013

by Alberto Manguel (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 7 ratings
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As far as one can tell, human beings are the only species for which the world seems made up of stories, Alberto Manguel writes. We read the book of the world in many guises: we may be travelers, advancing through its pages like pilgrims heading toward enlightenment. We may be recluses, withdrawing through our reading into our own ivory towers. Or we may devour our books like burrowing worms, not to benefit from the wisdom they contain but merely to stuff ourselves with countless words.

With consummate grace and extraordinary breadth, the best-selling author of A History of Reading and The Library at Night considers the chain of metaphors that have described readers and their relationships to the text-that-is-the-world over a span of four millennia. In figures as familiar and diverse as the book-addled Don Quixote and the pilgrim Dante who carries us through the depths of hell up to the brilliance of heaven, as well as Prince Hamlet paralyzed by his learning, and Emma Bovary who mistakes what she has read for the life she might one day lead, Manguel charts the ways in which literary characters and their interpretations reflect both shifting attitudes toward readers and reading, and certain recurrent notions on the role of the intellectual: "We are reading creatures. We ingest words, we are made of words. . . . It is through words that we identify our reality and by means of words that we ourselves are identified."

Previous page
  1. Print length
    144 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    University of Pennsylvania Press
  4. Publication date
    July 19, 2013
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0812245237
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0812245233
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

On Alberto Manguel:



"[Alberto Manguel's] imagination is supple and generous, and his work is full of surprises."—A. S. Byatt, The Washington Post



"The area which Alberto Manguel has mapped for himself is that of the eros of reading. He celebrates the diversities of desire—tempestuous, hidden, intermittent, lapsed—which relate us to a literary text."—George Steiner, The Guardian

About the Author

Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of numerous books celebrating the written word, including bestsellers A History of Reading, The Library at Night, and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Pennsylvania Press; 1st edition (July 19, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812245237
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812245233
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 7 ratings

About the author

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Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel

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Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor, Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, moved to Canada in 1982 and now lives in France, where he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre français des Arts et des Lettres.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
7 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Richard J. Boyle, Jr.
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2017
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Beautifully written work.
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Charlus
3.0 out of 5 stars Reading Metaphors
Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2013
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Alberto Manguel is one of the world's most devoted bibliophiles and for that reason I cannot be totally objective when i read him. His palpable passion for the written word has filled volume after volume over the years, as essayist, novelist, anthologist, historian, academic, editor, translator. Here he has collected a series of lectures exploring the sources and ramifications of three classic metaphors of the reader: the reader as traveler, as resident of an ivory tower and as book worm. There are 15 pages of notes for a text of a mere 120 pages suggesting the density of allusions on the page. And herein lies the weakness of the book: it feels like a bravura piece of research without being particularly enlightening or original. A whole chapter is devoted to Hamlet but this has more to do with the idea of the detached intellectual who can't act but seems to have little to do with readers per se and presumes Hamlet is an intellectual rather than just a man who can't make up his mind. Arguments can be made back and forth on this one, but the chapter still feels like an unnecessary detour.

Similarly his chapters on the reader as traveler becomes a little dense in the metaphors of metaphors department and required a great deal of focus with little payoff. Gems of insight are sprinkled throughout the text of course and his sections on the book worm was witty and convincing, especially as it used Emma Bovary and Don Quioxte as examples of deluded readers. But this has to go down as one of Mr Manguel's slighter efforts, not without merit but not essential either.
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