All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Denouncing Reality

According to the philosophy of the 17th century Gottfried Leibniz, no one can know what constitutes reality. We are each trapped in our isolated existence, as if in a windowless room, experiencing things that are both incomplete and incommunicable. Hence everything we claim about the world is an unwitting lie. Truth is some sort 0f summary of what we experience collectively. In such a world, everything is coordinated, as it were, by a benevolent deity who sees to it that we mesh together with some kind of rational and just cohesion despite our inherent mendacity. This, of course, is nonsense. Not because our experience is incomplete or inadequately expressed, but because there is no coordinating God to ensure matters work out with a proper regard for rationality or justice.

On the other hand, perhaps what we call random chance is in fact divine intervention at its most subtle. The Dirty War in Argentina at the end of the 1970’s is Manguel’s point of departure for exploring this possibility from an unlikely angle, namely the unreliability (and irrelevance) of personal biography. Indeed, by recruiting almost every significant Argentine writer of the last century into his narrative of exile and suspicion, Manguel shows how truth emerges from falsehood in a most unexpected way - not through divine action but through the giving up of the endeavour to state the truth. This is the surprising discovery of his journalistic protagonist who is investigating a death in the emigre literary community.

It is intriguing that in order to pull this off, Manguel has to resort to the testimony of a dead man... after he is dead. The dead man is the only one who has the complete picture, who doesn’t lie unknowingly. It is he who has orchestrated the circumstances of the political exiles who find themselves in Madrid - by maliciously lying. But even the dead man, although resurrected for narrative closure, is subject to the laws of chance in both what he encounters and in the results of his actions. He is killed, for example, by another, the writer Bevilaqua, one 0f his victims, and who is already dead. And Bevilaqua never made a claim to know anything.

An Argentinian writer central to Manguel’s story is Enrique Vila-Matas whose study, Bartleby and Co. (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), is about the significance of the books that have never been written, and consequently never told lies. Bevilaqua, it turns out, never actually wrote a book. Ultimately this is why he is important - for not writing. The other writers in the story, both fictional and real, are actually unimportant because as one of the characters insists: “Believe me. Lying: that is the great theme of South American literature.” Only by not telling the story does it even have a chance to be true. This is an alternative that Leibniz had never considered: Truth requires silence; or at least the humility to know that silence has become appropriate.

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