Read books by authors from other cultures and countries it’s like traveling at zero cost and without spending vacation days. The phrase is from my friend — voracious reader— Pei Serrano. He wrote it in an email recommending Israeli authors. I finished the Roberto Calasso’s essay ‘How to organize a library’, recently published by Editorial Anagrama, and I underlined a phrase in honor of these electronic conversations: «Every true reader follows a thread, although it can also be a hundred threads at a time ». When contemplating a library, be it orderly or in the inevitable disorder that Calasso defends, that thread becomes visible. Perhaps that is why he, he confesses, prefers to cover his books – like someone who covers his soul – so that his visitors do not know everything about him at a single glance at his library.
The English writer and editor Ann Morgan he wondered a few years ago what others saw when they looked at his library. She discovered with alarm that she only had English and American books. He considered himself a cosmopolitan and cultured person but his books, he says, “told another story.” In order to remedy this cultural void, he decided to spend a year in read a fiction book from each of the countries in the world, taking as reference the list of states recognized by the UN. The year he spent “reading the world” was an adventure full of surprises for Morgan. He discovered how difficult it was to get books from certain countries, the scarcity of translations into English of many literatures, if not the complete absence (as in the case of Madagascar). But also the great chain of solidarity that unleashed your project. People from all over the world wrote to recommend books. Booksellers from various countries sent them free of charge. And there was even a translator who translated an entire novel into English just for her. Morgan gives a lovely explanation for this whole wave of generosity: we humans like to share stories that have marked us, because by doing so we share something important to us, which also occurs in universal language: emotions. All this is told in a Ted Talk widely visited on the net that is entitled, precisely, ‘My year reading a book from every country in the world’.
It may interest you
It is easy to suspect that the project brought Ann Morgan knowledge of remote cultures, which she had never been interested in and never intended to do. I wonder if it would not suit us all to do the same. Otherwise it would suit the world. Morgan concludes by saying that his library today looks very different from what it did before he embarked on this adventure. And I go back to Calasso and wonder what the order of that library will be: continents? colors? emotions? Or the imperfect and inevitable alphabetical order? According to the Italian genius, no method will prevent from time to time a book is inexplicably lost and another appears when it was thought lost. Nor that suddenly two volumes that coexist on the same shelf repel each other. Mysteries of the libraries.
– .
