EMPIRE OF THE WORD PREMIERS ON TVO: ALBERTO MANGUEL’S HISTORY OF READING IS MORE EXCITING THAN IT SOUNDS

Canwest News Service
November 24, 2009 Tuesday 05:54 PM EST

"I don’t own any of that rubbish," Alberto Manguel sniffs in regard
to iPhones and BlackBerrys and other "intrusive" devices. However,
as one of the world’s most famously prodigious readers, the
Argentine-Canadian-French writer would be tempted to bring a Kindle
along with him under extraordinary circumstances, such as an expedition
"into the deepest Sahara."

Manguel couldn’t live without reading, and his new television
documentary series argues civilization itself couldn’t either.

"It’s the story of what you do without knowing that you do it," Manguel
says of Empire of the Word, premiering Wednesday on TVO. "That is to
say, your activity as a citizen in a literate society is channelled
through reading."

Luckily, Manguel consents to having a land line, otherwise journalists
wouldn’t be able to reach him at his home in the countryside near
Poitiers, France, which he shares with his partner and more than 30,000
books. Nor does he object to television per se, which is fortunate
for viewers of Empire of the Word. Hosted by Manguel, the four-part
documentary series is based on his 1996 book A History of Reading.

Like the book, the series progresses thematically; any duty to
chronology is dispensed with after the first episode. And as dry as a
leafing through the annals of reading may sound, the series becomes
the TV equivalent of a page- turner by virtue of its topicality,
arguing in many of its chapters – hopping from Tokyo to Toronto,
Paris to Istanbul – in favour of liberty and against dogmatism,
censorship and cultural forgetfulness.

Just where does Manguel see threats to freedom of expression? "Well,
everywhere," he says – beginning with Canada Customs.

Canadian border guards’ occasional prudishness notwithstanding, the
truly pernicious censorship tends to happen under oppressive regimes.

In its third one-hour episode, Empire of the Word exposes the
persistence of close-mindedness in the 21st century with segments
profiling those who would be silenced: Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher
hounded by Turkish authorities for releasing books about the Armenian
genocide; Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, who posts links to videos
exposing police brutality; and Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist
who depicted the Prophet Mohammed’s turban as a lit bomb. As another
Dane notes on camera, being part of a literate society means giving
up one’s expectation of never being offended.

Underscoring the fragility of literacy further, the second episode
notes that illiteracy remains widespread even in rich Western
societies. It follows an adult woman in Toronto trying to catch up
on a lifetimes’s worth of written words.

Does the fact that literacy is still under constant threat, even
after 5,000 years of being a demonstrably great idea, ever make
Manguel worry for its future?

"Never," he says. "It’s enough for a kid to come up to me and say,
I’ve discovered this great writer called Ernest Hemingway. Do you know
him?’ That happened here a week ago at a school I was teaching at,
and it was wonderful."

Manguel wants to close the book on the idea that reading itself is
in decline. "I think we have a rosy nostalgia for an invented past,
in which when we were young everyone read." he says.

The series takes a sympathetic look at Japanese text-message novels,
but stops short of approving of a corporate entity, namely Google,
serving as the world’s librarian of digital texts.

As for the series itself, the book man is pleased with the way the
TV men and women handled the material. "I had only one quibble with
the series, which was the title," Manguel says. "Empire of the Word
– for a series that wants to show the power of the word to use the
wrong word seems to me a big mistake. Empire is exactly the contrary
of what the written word, literature, does.

"It doesn’t conquer," he says. "It offers its services."

– The Agenda with Steve Paikin discusses issues brought up by Empire
of the Word on TVO at 8 p.m. tonight. The series, starting tonight,
airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. until Dec. 16 on TVO.