The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Just as Opaque the Second Time Round

In The Tunnel, Ernesto Sabato has a mysogonistic, puerile, obsessive, apparently psychopathic murderer tell the reader his every thought about a folie a deux with his victim and its rationale. My first time through The Tunnel left me bewildered. Of what literary rather than ideological merit is this work? For whose edification or amusement is it meant? My original conclusion: It’s a difficult book to be interested in much less like.

But I picked up on a hint by another GR reader and found that Sabato was a scientist before he was a writer and had incorporated quantum physics in The Tunnel as a sort of hidden metaphor. Indeed there is a short book by Halpern and Carpenter which outlines the way in which the metaphor is meant to work at key points in the book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quantum-Mech...).

This led me back into The Tunnel for another look. Halpern and Carpenter suggest that Sabato followed Borges in his interest in the ‘labyrinthine’ character of history through which the world changes direction at critical nodes. They also point out Borges allusions to alternative and even parallel universes that were of interest to Sabato. They contend that Sabato builds on these Borgian tropes to create scenes of discontinuous time in his story.

Maybe so. But I find the argument of Halpern and Carpenter to be somewhat tendentious. But even stipulating their observations, I don’t see the point. The metaphor, if there, is certainly not central to this tale of murder and psychopathy. Of course there are always alternative trajectories for any story, or for any historical reality. But the idea of using the ‘collapse of the quantum wavefront’ as the signal for a decisive turning point seems to me trivial and fatuous.

True, the protagonist, Juan Pablo, is continuously analysing his situation in terms of alternative possibilities, as in this internal monologue:

“I constructed an endless series of variations. In one I was talkative, witty (something in fact I never am); in another I was taciturn; in still another, sunny and smiling. At times, though it seems incredible, I answered rudely, even with ill-concealed rage. It happened (in some of these imaginary meetings) that our exchange broke off abruptly because of an absurd irritability on my part, or because I rebuked her, almost crudely, for some comment I found pointless or ill-thought-out.”

But this is a symptom of madness not a symbol of impending quantum resolution. Even the speaker recognises that “this damned compulsion to justify everything I do,” isn’t normal

Consequently it seems to me that the metaphor of quantum physics does nothing to explicate Sabato’s very dark story. Juan Pablo is a misanthrope without any mitigating, not to say redeeming, features. The Tunnel, therefore, doesn’t get any more interesting with a possible metaphorical foundation. Unless of course sabato’s intention was simply to create a sort of quantum uncertainty about this very foundation. In any case: not terribly stimulating.

My original review us here:

Cui bono?

I have been trying to finish this short novel for weeks. But I can only get through 10 pages at a time. I've finally given up. I don't get it. Is there something beyond an obsessive/compulsive folie a deux that I am simply unable to comprehend? Someone please explain where I am going wrong.

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The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Chess with Tennessee Williams 

Reading the Barlach Mysteries is like watching a one-act play by Tennessee Williams while playing chess against Garry Kasparov. The drama is tight as a drum. Every character is perfectly placed. Every move is in the open. But you know you are going to lose in the battle of wits, and you don't know how.

Durrenmatt writes with the precision of ... well, a Swiss watch. But because he tosses in the odd commentary on the Swiss class-system and the snobbery of small countries, he's never stuffy. In these two stories, there's more character development about the scenery than there is about the actors. But this is precisely correct. Each character is an element, a cog, in what are very well running little narrative machines.

Hans Barlach must be unique among fictional detectives. An over-the-hill cop on the verge of both retirement and death. Who has no use for any of the tricks of the trade, neither conventional nor high-tech. Who is more concerned with justice than the law or his conviction record. Who creates the evidence and circumstances he needs. As he says, "It's carelessness that makes the world a bad place." And Barlach is anything but careless.

And he also has something to say about current affairs. Although set in 1948, Barlach predicts, "A single dunce at the head of a world power, and we'll be carried off by the floods." Get your ark ready.

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Le Testament de Dieu by Bernard-Henri Lévy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Declining Resistance to Injustice

This is a book of political theology written by the French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Stalin's Terror and Mao's Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, all events that undermine traditional moral analysis. But the book was written before the Left became the governing meritocracy; before that time when fascism again became respectable; before the ideological victories of neo-liberalism and the religious Right; before the recognition of what globalisation really meant for the rich as well as the poor countries; before the ascendancy of post-modernism as a rejection of reasonableness as well as reason; So how does such a book hold up after almost four decades?

The Testament of God is a self-proclaimed statement of hope in the advancement of humanity. It was counter-cultural at the time and still is; not because of its optimism but because of the reasons for its optimism. Levy believed that the "morality of resistance" which he had seen and participated in during the 1960's and 70's had become an established feature of society. He also believed that this ethical innovation was a symptom of what he considered "a return to monotheism," by which he meant the Judaeo-Christian "passion for the Law" (Levy, widely known as a free-thinker, also is quoted as saying "The more law there is the more comfortable I feel").

For Levy, the Law is the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. His reading of the biblical witness is radical: it was written ('invented' is the term he prefers), he claims, by a bunch of heroic resistors to the prevailing mores of their time. This resistance constitutes its core, which is as relevant now as it was when it was written: "Primacy of the Law does not mean theocracy but, on the contrary, mistrust of all embodied norms, all profane gods, of all gods, in which there has appeared again at the end of the twentieth century, the cowardly obscurantism of ancient polytheism." 

A state of permanent mistrust of power, outlined and justified by theology sounds as much like anarchism now as it did in 1979. It doesn’t take much effort of imagination to see that Levy is working backwards, as it were, from a political stance which is ostensibly Trotskyite, to a dogmatic interpretation of the Bible which takes more from 2nd century Christianity than 20th century Judaism. Contemporary interpretations of Jesus as anti-Roman revolutionary are perhaps only slightly less outrageous than that of Jews fomenting political unrest as a matter of tradition.

The details of Levy's position seem less over the top than his headlines: The state is not an issue as such; we need it to avert chaos and brutality just as Hobbes said we did. But, and this is central, all Messiahs are false Messiahs for the Jewish Levy. Messiahs emerge not just from above, but also from below. Populism needs to be resisted as vigorously as dictatorship. 

Historically these two phenomena of populism and dictatorship are linked. They typically converge in the creation of what is usually called civil religion, that species of faith which takes its ethos as prevailing convention, whatever its content might be, and imitates traditional religion, often co-opting it. Certainly, Levy deserves credit here for anticipating the emergence of both trends as well as their intersection in the person of Donald Trump, the least likely leader of a civil religion in history.

Christianity is important for Levy primarily because it did what it intended to do: bring the singular God of Judaism to the pagan world (he prefers not to touch on the Pauline condemnation of the Law and its parody in Christian theology). Levy clearly has 'a thing' about polytheism and fears the return to a "political paganism" in, one presumes, an idolatrous civil religion. Nazism is the archetype of such a return to paganism. WWII is thus justifiably classed as a not just a moral but a religious war. Judaism, considered as the source of Christianity, was the primary target.

In this analysis, Levy understood the fundamental dynamics of Nazi hatred of Judaism. But he missed what more recent historians like Timothy Snyder have seen, namely that Hitler's return to paganism was not to a polytheistic cosmos but to one in which there was no distinction between Nature and Morality. To the extent that Nature and Morality are fused in polytheism, Levy might be correct therefore. But the essential feature of Nazi ethics was the idea that morality had been divorced from natural norms by Judaic monotheism. Since it was Jews who most insistently continued this distinction and did so genetically rather than dogmatically they had to be eliminated.

Levy's personal, ethical question is straightforward in the light of 20th century history to date: how does one avoid becoming either a victim or an assassin? It is in answering this question that I think Levy is both least and most successful. Least successful because despite his search through literature and philosophy he can't find a solution to the problem of oppressive conventionality. But most successfully because he ends up outlining an approach which he eventually pursues in later years. This approach is inadequately described as Kabbalah, the never-ending interpretation of texts and conditions considering the overwhelming divine imperative of Justice.

It is in his discussion of justice that Levy mentions the Kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem, and only there, without an index entry. Yet his closing remarks on justice suggest that he had already assimilated the view of Kabbalah.

"For a Jew, good is not symmetrical to or the antonym of evil. To every evil there does not correspond, there is not opposed, a good that is somehow its other side or its just blood price. The just man is also, above all, the one who knows the vanity, the collateral futility of justice." 

Justice, in other words, must be invented continuously from first principles. Justice, if nothing else, must never become a convention enforced either from above or below, but created within, if necessary against universal opposition. Responsibility for the criteria of justice cannot be delegated or avoided. The Law does not specify what constitutes justice, it merely insists that justice be done.

This indeed is anarchism but of a very peculiar sort. The anarchism of permanent revolution is to be applied to oneself not to one's fellows. It is the defining characteristic of the morality of resistance. This to me is an enduring and intriguing conclusion. But it was not a successful prediction. The gains of the political Right, the cooptation of the Left and the triumph of globalisation have crushed whatever impulse toward the permanent reformulation of justice there was in 1979. Nothing persists of its own momentum; not even the divine.

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Gently Continental by Alan Hunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gentle Elegance

As a newcomer to Alan Hunter, I had no expectations about his style. Many have criticised Gently Continental as an aberration from his usual form. I find it wonderfully original and enjoyable.

Gently Continental is, if nothing else, a book about England, its mores, foibles and its charms. Unlike the usual fictional narrator who disappears into the background of a story, Hunter's initially puts himself forward with wry wit and irony. As details of the crime and those associated with it emerge, the narrator is there to comment on the illogic of the local bumpkins and the procedural wrangling among official agencies. No one is spared, from the local constable to the ministers in Whitehall.

And unlike many murder mysteries which spring the villainous nature of the perpetrator as almost an afterthought if not a downright deus ex machina, Hunter does a slow reveal of all the personalities involved. And it is here that his narrator is at his wittiest and most ironic. I think it is the sustained irony that creates an almost conspiratorial bond with the reader. We and the narrator are above the petty interests and faults of all the East Anglian bumpkins and bureaucratic civil servants.

Above all except Detective Chief Inspector Gently himself, of course, who outranks the narrator and the Reader in terms of insight and skilful observation. The irony comes to a dead halt with Gently's appearance on the scene, and by its sudden absence gives him an immediate presence without the need for description. The narrator disappears entirely in a dialogue between Gently and his witnesses that reads like a film script. Just questions and answers with the occasional bit of stage direction, but no interpretation, and certainly no irony.

It's a remarkable technique which I have encountered nowhere else. Gently's competence is established incidentally, as it were, by the narrative shift. It's a technique that doesn't transfer easily to film in which the sustained irony of the narrator can't be captured except indirectly - precisely the opposite effect of the book. So Gently Continental exemplifies at least one point of superiority of literature over cinema.

Another advantage over cinema is that Gently provides meaning to what is known by others through his presence The local law enforcers only realise the significance of what they know, not when Gently interprets, but when he is merely in the room with them. They become inspired. And they are taken aback by this unexpected inspiration. They even become somewhat self-aware, and appear to learn in his presence.

Finally, it would seem impossible, except in print, to capture Gently's poetic thought processes, expressed in short, clipped, metrical phrases. These demand to be read aloud like an Elizabethan play. Quick, impressionistic, precise, they convey not just thought but the personality of the thinker who is merely enigmatic for everyone involved in the case. The effect is a sort of civilised noir, hard-nosed but articulate, even elegant in the connections made.

So not just a murder mystery but a literary sampler of Hunter's undoubted talents. Highly recommended for the jaded crime-thriller reader.

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CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping by Kerry Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Seek Elsewhere for Insight

It's not possible to read Brown's biography of Xi Jinping without comparing it constantly to Ezra Vogel's Deng Xioaping and the Transformation of China. And in the comparison, Kerry Brown looks bad. Brown's text is more a potted history of modern China than an insightful revelation of individual character. There is much about the political structure of the country but little about the real sources of power. Vogel is a qualified Sinologist who uses his diverse sources with finesse. Brown is a tourist in comparison who can only restate official documents. I found the writing flat and often simply beside the point. A disappointment.

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Local Girls by Alice Hoffman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Effects of Ennui

Back in the days when Archie Bunker was a television buffoon and not the President of the United States, the Long Island suburbs were a region of anonymous mediocrity. Nothing happened there because there was no developed society. The components were in place - schools, shops, public libraries, cinemas, restaurants - but they never formed a coherent whole, just an endless desert of unrewarding routine practised within hundreds of indistinguishable neighbourhoods by hundreds of thousands of indistinguishable families..

Alice Hoffman captures the atmosphere of the Long Island suburbs on the turn, as it were, from sterile but unremarkable commuter land of the 50's and 60's in which everyone could feel superior to the remaining denizens of Brooklyn and Queens, to what it has become: a culturally sick region of boredom, drugs, post-religious superstition, and psychic healers. The only way to survive is escape. Emigration and suicide are the principle options. Local Girls is a shorthand version of all the reasons why getting out as young as possible is the only sensible choice.

I could be wrong of course. Hoffman's fiction may be just a light, autobiographical, romantic melodrama; in which case it is largely a waste of reading time and energy. All the referential tropes are there - the identical houses, absent fathers, the parkways, the turnpike, the North Shore, Jones Beach - but their meaning is trivial without some context. Only as a cautionary tale to the young trapped in the morass of the un-civilisation of Nassau County does the book have any merit. It then also helps to explain why Archie Bunker has become President.

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Miss Lonelyhearts 
by 

Nathanael West

 

Choosing Your Poison

A story of relentless, universal, even cosmic failure. Every character is a failure: as writer, poet, husband, wife, journalist, and most importantly, follower of Jesus Christ. All are "stamped with the dough of suffering," demonstrate a sort of extreme frustration-neurosis, and are demoralised. Failure provokes cruelty and hatefulness: men dislike each other; men despise women, and gay men only slightly less; women manipulate men when they can; they ignore them when they can't. The world is essentially mad:

"You are plunging into a world of misery and suffering, peopled by creatures who are strangers to everything but disease and policemen. Harried by one, they are hurried by the other..."

The letters-to-the-editor, largely illiterate, describing the personal misery and failures of the public at large pour on to the desk of the advice columnist, Miss Lonelyhearts. He often feels compelled to recommend suicide as the only effective remedy for the pain that is recounted to him. And not just to reduce their pain: "Christ may be the answer," he says, "but if he did not want to get sick he had to stay away from this Christ business." Christ had become "merely decorative" not only in the protagonist's shabby room, where the human figure had been removed from his cross, but also in society at large.

Violence by the stronger against the weaker is normal and expected. The slightest mis-step or ill-considered phrase results in rage and instant retaliation. Prohibition, the Great Experiment, is in force but unenforced; alcohol is the universal drug of choice to dull the tedium of life. Oblivion is the normal state of being for the protagonist. Social contracts from marriage to employment are meaningless formalities and breached in spirit if not in fact. The daily headlines testify to the general barbarity of existence. Racism and suspicion - of blacks, Jews, foreigners - is typical in everyday encounters.

What are the alternatives? Back to the land is a boor. Escape to the South Seas is a worn-out cliche. Hedonism is too expensive. Art is an illusion. Treating the world as a joke is generally what the world does but Miss Lonelyhearts simply can't do that. Shrike, his editor, suggests the only available path, "The church is our only hope, the First Church of Christ Dentist, where He is worshiped as Preventer of Decay."

One has to remind oneself repeatedly while reading it that Miss Lonelyhearts was written in 1933. Nothing about it is dated. It anticipates the culture of sex, drugs, social disintegration and national narcissism that was only temporarily interrupted by WWII but that re-emerged with force in the 1960's and thereafter. Miss Lonelyhearts could easily be mistaken for the novelistic manifesto of existentialism. 'Suicide is always a live option' is a theme presented persistently a decade before Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, and two decades before its translation hit New York City.

That West was able to detect the more fundamental deterioration occurring below the more apparent economic ills of the Great Depression is remarkable. His perception is poetic:

"Americans have dissipated their radical energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians. And they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them."

And not even if Christ gets back on his cross does it make any difference to the fate of anyone involved.

The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Mystery of Representation

Look at any word long enough and it becomes absurd. Such a recognition isn’t illusion but appreciation. Words are absurd. When we consider them as what they really are, it is clear that they are merely arbitrary sounds or signs on paper, often ugly and grotesque in their presumptuous arrogance of an independent existence.

And if for words, why not the users of words, the speakers and writers who treat others, or even themselves, as if they were the words used about them? Are not they absurd as well?

It is so easy to become the words used about us when they are used again and again, and with relentlessly refined precision. As F, the investigator and documentary film-maker hired to determine the reason for a murder, recognises. The professional notes keep on the murder-victim by her psychiatrist husband “weren’t observations at all but literally an abstracting of her humanity.” The victim is portrayed inhumanely by her closest relation. Those described thus become ugly and offensive regardless of the intentions of the describer. The words extract the existence from their target, which is literally observed to death.

This is the theme - if there is one, who can be certain of anything with this story? - of Durrenmatt’s Assignment: How we destroy existence with words. Not just the personal existence of other people, but the existence of whole cultures. Words, no matter how precisely they are employed, inevitably create a stereotype, a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing, a part that masquerades as a whole.

This is the formal definition of heresy. Heresy easily becomes prejudice, especially when we are unacquainted with the person or thing in question (but even sometimes when we know them intimately). Our responses are to words not to other human beings. It is from this absurd connection between words and things that Durrenmatt creates his ‘mystery’, not a who-dunnit but a what-happened, or more accurately is-anything-in-this-story-to-be-taken-at-face-value.

“The meaning of existence is existence, which insight, once accepted and affirmed, makes existence unbearable.” A psychological insight like this one can create a psychological illness. In Tina’s, the apparent victim’s, case the result is severe depression, brought about by her husband’s observation of not only her behaviour but her own words written in her private journal and intruded upon by him. This is the ultimate iatrogenic risk for a psychiatrist’s wife. And the ultimate crime for a psychiatrist, even if there is nothing to prosecute.

But the situation is actually more complicated. Observers provoke observation of themselves. The wife notices her husband’s ‘objective’ attention and responds in kind. Through observation of his various quirks and idiosyncrasies, she grows to hate him. So too, F muses, might the Gaia of the planet observe its objectification and respond to its human inhabitants. Observers too, therefore, are turned into words, numbers, signs.

So what ethics should apply? Unobserved men and women do not exist. Nor can they. There is no such animal as a human being without his fellow, who watches, anticipates, measures, values and responds to him, most frequently using words. Even a person who is totally alone reflects on himself. A quandary therefore. Is the psychiatrist (or his wife) guilty of bad observational technique or of simply being human? The mystery looms larger still.

And it’s not just words which are problematic. Art, particularly visual art, has all the same issues as language. It claims to represent. What exactly? The ‘object’ of art is as illusive as the denotation of a word. A painting can be as pejorative as a rumour. Even more so since the artist can claim interpretive license. Tina had an artist listed in her journal. Did he have something to contribute to her death?

Arriving in North Africa, the scene of Tina’s death, F finds her own camera crew being filmed while filming. Yet another problematic mutual observation that affects both parties. The site where Tina’s body was found, an ancient Shi’ite monument, is guarded by dead, rotting, silent ‘saints’ who had protested the place’s excavation and expired in situ. Among these corpses Tina’s body had been discovered, half consumed by the local wildlife. The monument itself is perhaps the ultimate cipher, a huge black cube of polished stone, mostly buried in the sand.

The presence of the observing camera crew of course provokes the local police into a transvestite investigation of their own in which various suspects, or rather their testimony, are presented. One is shot. He was, after all, nothing more than his confession, coerced or not. Unfortunately all the documentary footage mysteriously disappears. But would its recording of the statements of prisoners have made any difference? To whom? The story is that Tina’s murder was revenge by someone’s security service for her husband’s soft stand on terrorism. Why not, it’s a good story.

F persists. She finds a clue, a coat that looks like Tina’s. Is a found clue more authentic than a word, or a portrait, or a confession? She is drawn into a conspiracy with some of the locals, in which she is replaced by a ‘double’. She becomes in other words her own representation. She is unaccountably mistaken for Tina because she wears her coat. She becomes yet another representation.

Her co-conspirator provides ‘testimony’ that the murder victim wasn’t Tina after all. She is alive and with her husband according to the gossip magazines. More symbolic representations of ‘reality’. But yet another corpse is certainly real, the cameraman who mistook F for the dead woman - either Tina or her surrogate is unclear. Yet another cameraman is assigned to F by her conspiring friend. Named Polypheme - literally: abounding in tales and legends - he is nothing but a representation of things not himself.

Polypheme leads her to a sophisticated, underground desert hideout. The place is a virtual warehouse of film and photographs. Stills cover the walls, rolls of film are strewn about the floors. Polypheme, true to his name, tells F a long complicated tale of his background and reasons for his trajectory from the Bronx to North Africa. This tale may have meaning, but it has nothing to do with the history or identity of Polypheme.

The desert hideout, F learns from Polypheme, is in fact an observational bunker to monitor nuclear armament developments globally, using mainly satellites to observe the world, and other satellites to observe the observing satellites. Abandoned now except for Polypheme, the bunker is now the possible target of nuclear weapons. Explosions can be heard intermittently somewhere outside.

Their bunker-chat becomes theological: “If God we’re a pure observer, could he remain unsullied in the observation of his creation?” And if not God, then what about a lowly human cameraman? The discussion turns, appropriately for a Swiss author, Barthian: “... a god who was observed is no longer a god, God was not subject to observation, God’s freedom consisted in being a concealed, hidden god, while man’s bondage consisted of being observed... “ This bondage has become more oppressive as it is not people but now machines, computers, that do the observing. These computers were “gods watching each other.”

Polypheme it turns out has film of the murder because he arranged it using his insane ex-Vietnam American pilot-friend as the instrument. The victim wasn’t Tina but a Danish journalist who used her passport. She resembles F, not just in appearance but also in her obsessive but fruitless search for truth. Trying to get past representations is a dangerous business. Indeed Polypheme has the same motiveless intention for F as he did for his previous victim. But at the last moment she is saved by a police-chief-ex-machina. Polypheme and numerous others get it on film.

Reversing my opening remark: Perhaps if one looks long enough at the absurd, it develops coherent meaning. This is, after all, the fundamental principle of Kabbalah (See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). I can only hope that such meaning emerges for me at some point from this rather chaotic ride through semiotics. Durrematt makes Umberto Eco look like a slouch when it comes to opaque complexity. The Assignment is not for the weak or faint-hearted.

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The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Paradise in Danger

The Library at Night is my Bible, Quran and Vedic guide on the aesthetics of this somewhat odd institution called the library. Odd because the concept of a warehouse filled with printed volumes available for general consultation is a rather late development in European civilisation, and odd because it is a concept that seems to have run its course as that civilisation becomes more technological. For this latter reason alone Manguel's aesthetic observations are critical: something is being lost in the technology, quite apart from the books.

I have supervised a small collegiate academic library at the University of Oxford for the last 10 years. But I am not a professional librarian, by which I mean I have no degree or other qualifications in so-called Library Science. I am not, in other words, a member of that fraternity. In some ways this is an advantage since, unlike many of my colleagues in the university, I can actually pay attention to books and readers rather than technology and 'best practice' techniques.

Having said that, my first experience of librarianship was over forty years ago. I worked at the time for a well-known firm of management consultants in New York City. On my first day with the firm I was assigned to a pro bono project with the New York Public Library. The Library's card catalogue, much of it on highly acidic paper produced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was crumbling away to dust. Informed just of these minimal facts I was dispatched to 5th Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan

The client was the chair of the Board of Trustees, the formidable Mrs Brooke Astor. Mrs. Astor asked if we could meet daily for tea so that I could brief her on the seriousness of the state of affairs and suggest what might be done. It turned out that the situation was more acute than Mrs. Astor had assumed. It was even worse than anything Manguel had encountered in his exceptionally thorough research.

Not only was the NYPL card catalogue disintegrating, but when a card was lost or severely damaged, it meant that the associated volume was irrecoverable. The reason: since the library opened in 1911 its books had been catalogued with a shelf location according to, not subject or title or author, which might have allowed a proximity search, but date of receipt by the Library. That is, for all intents and purposes books were stored in an entirely random order. A missing book therefore was the needle in a very large haystack.

Fortunately, solving the problem was easy. The library was closed for 2 months. The catalogue boxes were sealed and crated in situ. All of the approximately 2 million cards were shipped by air to South Korea where a small army of data entry clerks who neither read nor spoke English completed a virtually flawless electronic transcription. In fact, it was because they knew no English and could not therefore erroneously interpolate that their accuracy was so high.

This was my first lesson in the concrete importance of library aesthetics. It was also my last until I wandered into Blackfriars Oxford. I wasn't aware either of Manguel's book, or my need for It. So I stumbled blindly into his aesthetic categories without assistance.

Whatever else it is, a library is about the relationships among books and between an entire assemblage of books and some specific group of readers. Manguel's sense of the library collection as a whole is consequently vital. My first task at Blackfriars was the disposition of approximately 10,000 books left from several legacies and stored in boxes in every available nook and cranny in the college. So I was immediately forced into acts of wanton vandalism and arbitrary censorship. Books are not equal, even if they're free, even if they're economically valuable.

Making a choice about which to keep, which to sell, and which to give away is in some way soul-destroying to anyone with a fondness for books. But it also forces a decision on what one thinks the library is. Blackfriars is both a research and undergraduate library so there is a tendency is to keep as much as possible. On the other hand, our members have access to the enormous Bodleian collection as well as to other collegiate libraries. Rational prudence dictates therefore to only take unique new items.

Ultimately the only thing a librarian can do is make an aesthetic judgement about the coherence of the entire collection. But he or she must make this judgment that no one else feels obliged to. And the judgement must be advertised as widely as possible until its challenged. My judgement was to develop certain major classifications – the European Holocaust, North American Philosophy, South American fiction for example. These classifications have become sharper over the years but no one has challenged me yet. And we have developed a certain reputation in the university as a consequence. I'm supposing that my taste and sense of balance has been accepted. That or I'm considered too irascible to contradict.

Manguel's appreciation of the aesthetics of power in the library is something I know many of my colleagues in other university libraries lack. Deciding who can be a member, who can access the collection and for what reasons is an exercise in power, one that has significant effects in academia.

The original great library of Alexandria was meant as both a storage place to access printed material and as a meeting place for scholars. At Blackfriars, this is still the case. But physical space is limited and there is a significant population of riff-raff that one does not want on the premises even at Oxford. I'm forced to make snap-judgments daily about the scholarly value of individuals applying for access. Once again the only way I know of to avoid arbitrariness is to be as explicit as possible about the criterion for membership and the reasons for it. Sometimes a smile has swayed me I admit, but overall there haven't been too many complaints.

The ordering of books on the shelves is not a trivial matter as Manguel notes. Quite apart from the NYPL issue, the placement of books determines the types of random encounters that readers are likely to make. We use a modified Library of Congress classification. But the LC is notoriously bad in theology. So in the 1950's one of my predecessors modified the system, using the then unassigned class of BQ for Christian Writers. Since then BQ has been designated by the LC for Hindu studies. Consequently we get a number of calls inquring whether our exceptionally large Hindu collection is available for browsing.

I have an ongoing aesthetic battle with the technical establishment of the Bodleian itself. As a collegiate library, we are entirely independent of the Bodleian but participate in the university-wide catalogue which is maintained by them. The Bodleian, like the Library of Congress and other large institutions, essentially sells its cataloguing information to lesser libraries and so has a commercial interest in the technical precision of catalogue entries.

The 'language' in which the catalogue is expressed is a cross between computer-code and a group-constructed corporate memo - highly structured but entirely irrational. It is ugly, it is costly and it is a symbol to me of bureaucratic domination. The Bodleian has an interest in it. I do not. Our readers can easily find what they need through the traditional author, title and subject headings plus a little local knowledge. The Bodleian demand conformity; I find their demands unpleasant and presumptuous. Our modus vivendi is that I do it my way and they spend any additional effort necessary to do it their way. High-tech aesthetics are clearly not my cup of tea..

I could go on commenting on the relevance of each of Manguel's categories – the library as workshop, as imagination, as mind, as myth, as memory, as a snub to death - but I think the point is made. His view of the library as an essentially aesthetic object is correct and it is operational. Everything from architecture to the order of books on shelves can be subsumed under an aesthetic. The aesthetic is not arbitrary but it is also not linearly rational. It is certainly not limited to the purely economic or technical constraints that seem to dominate discussions among librarians. Ultimately the aesthetic is some manifestation of a shared ideal. And there are better and worse ideals depending on how inclusive they are.

Jorge Luis Borges was director of the National Library of Argentina for 18 years. His idealised vision of the library carries some weight given his career as a writer. Reflecting his regard for the Jewish mystical treatise, The Zohar, Borges conceived the universe itself as a book. For him paradise "existed in the shape of a library" where one could constantly encounter the unexpected, the disconcerting, and, with a bit of luck, oneself. That's the most inclusive ideal I've yet to encounter.

Postscript: Just to show how inclusive, this piece just showed up in the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/27/blood-bookworms-bosoms-and-bottoms-the-secret-life-of-libraries

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