For bibliophiles like me, it’s the stuff of nightmares.  Moving from a spacious farmhouse in the Loire Valley to a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan sounds horrible enough, but on top of that having to pack a personal library of more than 30,000 books, deciding which to discard, which to store, and which to retain? Hideous.  That was the task faced by  Alberto Manguel and recounted with insight, humor, and elegance in his memoir, Packing My Library.  Señor Manguel, a distinguished critic, translator, library director and writer, thinks of himself primarily as a reader and book-lover, and what a sensitive and subtle one he is, gently teasing apart the tightly connected strands of possessiveness, obsessiveness, curiosity, commitment, and awe that bind all book lovers to their libraries.  A shelf in my own library is devoted to books about books and Packing My Library has now taken its place there alongside favorites by Diana Athill, Gabriel Zaid and others.

The book’s subtitle is “An elegy and ten digressions“.  It’s hard to miss the quality of pensiveness and sorrow that infuses the memoir, as if the act of boxing his precious library awoke an existential sadness, provoking melancholic reflections on creativity, collecting, solitude, faith, and much more.  Not that this is a humorless memoir.  Quite the opposite, in fact, but it’s serious, as all important books must be, and it gives appropriate place to the sorrow that’s inescapable in every life. The separation from his beloved library foreshadows the bigger letting-go that faces every one of us.