CuriosityBy Alberto ManguelYale University Press: 2015Alberto Manguel's Curiosity is a reconfigured commonplace book, a volume cut from the mass of his reading notes.Even a description as stark as this fails to communicate how indirect, how like ventriloquism Manguel's style is. He evades directness like an old man who, when you ask him a simple question like "do you want fish for lunch?" pauses, shuffling through his memories, then responds, "once when we were just outside Saigon…" Eventually his reminiscences about Vietnam come round to make the point that no, he does not want fish for lunch. Rather than state a thesis, Manguel will always tell a story; rather than venture an opinion, he will always recount someone else's opinion. In A Reading Diary, he muses "I could compose a diary made exclusively of fragments from other diaries. This would reflect my habit of thinking in quotations."Appropriately, therefore, Curiosity is not just about curiosity. It tries at the same time to be a collection of essays about Dante's Commedia, one of the great narrative poems of Western literature, a sort of travelogue through the three realms of the Christian afterlife, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven:

Conscious of my hubris, it occurred to me that, following Dante's example of having a guide for his travels -- Virgil, Statius, Beatrice, Saint Bernard -- I might have Dante himself as a guide to mine, and allow his questioning to help steer my own.

So the famous engraved illustrations of the Commedia from Cristoforo Landino's fifteenth-century edition precede each chapter, and Manguel weaves discussion of Dante's poem throughout his book.Curiosity, however, remains a focus for only two of the seventeen chapters. It works as a theme for Manguel because it never actually restricts him in any way. Curiosity gives way to things-one-might-be-curious-about, which is not too far from stuff-that-interests-me. The Dante connection is also occasionally perfunctory, though more nearly ubiquitous than curiosity. In short, like many of Manguel's other books, this one secretly is a collection of informal essays, with deceptively cohesive packaging. It will disappoint readers looking for a systematic investigation of curiosity or a monograph on Dante. Readers prepared and eager to digress -- to host a raconteur in their reading room -- will find a treat:

Quotations (and misquotations), asides, seemingly dead ends, explorations and rummagings, retracing one's steps and leaping ahead -- all seem to me valid instruments for inquiry. I sympathize both with Little Red Riding Hood's inclination to leave the set path and with Dorothy's decision to follow the Yellow Brick Road.

Manguel created his perfect form in the 2003 book, A Reading Diary. It is nothing but his daily notes about rereading, in a year, twelve of his favorite books. Probably Manguel manages this form so well because it resembles his writing in a natural state, before the Procrustean laws of book-publication impose the necessity of large-scale organization. I wish that Manguel's publishers would simply commission him to produce a new Reading Diary every year, but usually he's paid for something with a bit more structure. When such a structure imposes its demands, Manguel's books can begin to resemble oversaturated watermelons with white pulp where there should be sweet redness.Fortunately, Manguel is now too old and too sure-handed to pretend for very long that he is writing a monograph. Curiosity is a book about the Talmud and the Mars rover, sophistry and knot-languages, David Hume and reading machines, Zoroaster and Pinocchio -- and, periodically, curiosity and Dante. He embraces the character of his own thinking -- miscellaneous, excursive, fragmentary.So the real cohesion of Manguel's book is not topical but formal. Each chapter follows an identical pattern. He begins with an autobiographical anecdote, proceeds to deal with a passage or theme from the Commedia, then seizes upon a digression with the avidity of someone escaping homework to play. By the sixth or seventh chapter, I felt as if I was reading three separate collections -- one of mini-memoirs, one of literary criticism, and one of informal essays.Manguel's autobiographical byplay has always been one of his strengths. Even in his most successful monograph-like book, A History of Reading, one of the best passages is his prefatory recollection of reading to the blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges. Manguel was working in an Argentinian bookstore when he met Borges. The writer came in searching for resources to study Anglo-Saxon and left with a new recruit for his army of readers-aloud. Manguel's service to Borges was an education all by itself:

I felt like I was the unique owner of a carefully annotated edition, compiled for my exclusive sake. Of course, I wasn't; I (like many others) was simply [Borges's] notebook, an aide-memoire which the blind man required in order to assemble his ideas. I was more than willing to be used.

Manguel returns again in Curiosity to his rich veins of recollection. Perhaps the most touching moment in the new book is his account of suffering a stroke:

A week before Christmas 2013, in the early evening, I sat down at my desk to answer a letter. But as I was about to write the words, I felt as if they were escaping me, vanishing into air before reaching the paper. [...] After much mental strain, I managed, painfully, to string a few words together and set them down coherently on the page. I felt as if I had been groping in an alphabet soup, and as soon as I put in my spoon to grab one, it would dissolve into meaningless fragments. I went back into the house and tried to tell my partner that something was wrong, but I realized that as well as write them, I was unable to mouth the words except in a painfully protracted stutter. He called an ambulance.

At the hospital, afraid that he was losing language, his most precious possession,

To prove to myself that I had not lost the capacity of remembering words, only that of expressing them out loud, I began to recite in my head bits of literature I knew by heart. The flow was easy: poems by Saint John of the Cross and Edgar Allen Poe, chunks of Dante and Victor Hugo, doggerel by Arturo Capdevila and Gustav Schwab echoed clearly in the darkness of my hospital room.

This gives a new turn to the idea he has a "habit of thinking in quotations." The memory of the experience of this stroke leads Manguel to some of the most fascinating reflections in the book, about whether we should put more store in the personality constructed of our literary commitments and memories than in our bodies or the more traditionally intimate contents of our minds. Perhaps we are the words we treasure.After the opening anecdote, each chapter in Curiosity adverts to Dante. On the whole, oddly, these interludes of literary criticism are somewhat unsatisfying. When explaining in his Introduction that he will use Dante to organize what follows, Manguel defends himself:

I am fully aware that, after generations of commentaries beginning with those of Dante's own son Piero, writing shortly after his father's death, it is impossible to be either comprehensively critical or thoroughly original in what one has to say about the poem. And yet, one might be able to justify such an exercise by suggesting that every reading is, in the end, less a reflection or translation of the original text than a portrait of the reader, a confession, an act of self-revelation and self-discovery.

But, in fact, Manguel's direct discussions of Dante are some of the least self-revealing parts of the book. At points they feel like concessions to the pattern he has determined to apply to this book -- he wants to write a chapter about, say, environmentalism, but to get there he is obliged to find some passage in the Commedia from which to digress to his real destination. For all I know, precisely the opposite sequence actually occurred; perhaps reflecting on the Commedia inspired his discussion of environmentalism. But the sense that many of these preliminary commentaries are perfunctory recurred frequently as I read.Still, at his best Manguel powerfully communicates his enthusiasm about Dante and swirls the passages he discusses into a rich intertextual soup. For example, in one of the scenes from the poem that Manguel dwells upon, Dante discovers the soul of Ulysses in hell. His crime? According to Dante's guide, Ulysses is being punished for his trickery during the Trojan War. Manguel notes, however, that these offenses are not the type of sin punished in that particular part of Dante's Hell. Instead, "if we consider Ulysses' sin as one of curiosity, Dante's vision of the wily adventurer may become a little clearer." Dante asks the soul of Ulysses not about his knavery but about what happened after the war. The reply he receives sounds highly revisionist to anyone familiar with Homer. (Dante likely was not.) In Dante's version of Ulysses' life, the warrior does not arrive safely home to his wife and son in the kingdom of Ithaca, but pursues his curiosity by sailing past his island and beyond the pillars of Hercules. There he is shipwrecked, dies, and ends up in hell:

Dante's Ulysses seems to have met his end as a punishment not for the fault of evil counsel but for going beyond what God has deemed a permissible curiosity. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden, Ulysses is offered the whole of the knowable world to explore: only past that horizon he must not venture.

So it appears as if Dante wasn't too keen on curiosity. On the other hand, "the entire Commedia can be read as the pursuit of one man's curiosity." Most of the incidents throughout the poem are prompted by Dante's tendency to linger along his itinerary, asking questions – and he is receiving a guided tour of the afterlife, hardly the sort of thing to interest an incurious man. Manguel concludes, therefore, that the Commedia dramatizes a good and a bad kind of curiosity. This distinction stretches back through Christian scholasticism to pre-Christian sources, to the story of Pandora's curiosity about her box and Aristotle's assertion that all humans by nature desire to know, bad curiosity and good. The difference between them -- and therefore the question of what curiosity is -- haunts Dante's book.After this discussion, I briefly longed for the book that Curiosity bills itself to be and isn't: an extended study of curiosity as a trope in the Commedia.But all such longings on my part were swept away when, as always in this book, Manguel embarked on the informal essay hidden inside the chapter. I think he is, by nature, first a diarist, and second an essayist. In every chapter of Curiosity, once the opening ceremonies are out of the way, Manguel falls naturally into the syncopated gait of an essayist, following his enthusiasms with odd persistence and charming pedantry, coming up suddenly from the extended discussion of a minor point with an insightful generalization, seeming to lose his way but always circling back around to show that his digressions are a propos.Early in the book, Manguel breaks away from his Dantean harness to conduct a merry polemic against Plato. Plato, he thinks, got the sophists all wrong. Manguel argues this point for half a dozen pages (and succeeded in provoking some enjoyably outraged marginalia from me, a partisan of Plato):

The divide between the Sophists and the followers of Socrates was largely a matter of class. Plato was an aristocrat and scorned these wandering pedagogues who set themselves up for hire in the market among the rising middle of the noveau riche. This class was composed of merchants and artisans whose newly acquired wealth allowed them to buy weapons and, by enrolling in the infantry, political power. Their goal was to take the place of the old nobility, and for this they needed to learn how to speak effectively in an assembly. The Sophists offered to teach them the necessary rhetorical skills in exchange for money.

The question of Plato's relationship to the sophists has, frankly, very little to do with Dante, and only a tangential relationship to curiosity, but disquisitions about such things are the best pleasures that reading Manguel affords.Indeed, if one reads Curiosity aright -- as a collection of essays rather than a monograph -- the only frustrations that diminish one's pleasure come from his failure to finish his own digressions. Too often Manguel will open a promising if irrelevant subject, only to take a tangent from his tangent and leave the reader glancing backward like a child straining to peer around the window of a high speed train as it flashes by some fascinating graffiti.For example, in the chapter on Dante's Ulysses, Manguel pens a fascinating paragraph, listing contemporary instances where the good and bad consequences of curiosity seem to converge on identical issues:

The question of how to find cures for deadly illnesses elicits the question of how to feed an ever-increasing and aging population; the question of how to develop and protect an egalitarian society elicits the question of how to prevent demagogy and the seduction of fascism; the question of how to create jobs to develop the economy elicits the question of how the creation of these jobs might tempt us to turn a blind eye on human rights and how it might affect the natural world around us; the question of how to develop technologies that allow us to hoard more and more information elicits the question of how to access, refine, and keep from abusing such information; the question of how to explore the unknown universe elicits the uneasy question of whether our human senses are capable of apprehending whatever it is we might discover on earth or in outer space.

I longed for Manguel to take up and discuss any one of these questions. (In fact his social and political commentary is always tantalizingly brief and interesting.) But instead, he took the occasion of the last clause to -- you guessed it -- digress to the associated subject of the Curiosity rover on Mars. At one point in the book, he says, with approval, that "for [the Islamic mystic] Abulafia, pleasure is the principal fruit of the mystical experience and also its essential purpose, more important than the attainment of intellectual answers." Call me a spoil-sport, but I like at least the glimmer of an answer to some of my questions. Manguel, one gathers, does not.Closing the last page of this book, I wondered if perhaps Manguel intended to demonstrate curiosity in the behavior of his prose more than to discuss it. In many ways the book ought to be approached as a charming portrait of the curious man, not so distant in its deep structure from A Reading Diary. But if so, is the underlying argument that curiosity is essentially deficient in attention? If so, Manguel contradicts himself by the very conception of his book. He chose Dante as his guide, chose a curious man who worked out his themes with breath-taking system and thoroughness. This choice triggers an unintended comparison that will remind even the most sympathetic reader of Manguel that questions are not inherently better than answers, that the greatest insights are the reward of diligence, and that curiosity is not always careless.____Robert Minto is an editor of Open Letters Monthly. He blogs and tweets.