J and I just back from an evening in the lower reaches of the CBC bunker down on Cambie Street, where we posed as “Members of Our Studio Audience” during a taping of the Studio One Book Club, with Alberto Manguel—who describes himself as “a Canadian writer, born in Argentina and living in France”—as the featured guest of hosts Sheryl MacKay and John Burns (Books editor of The Georgia Straight). Those who missed the taping will have a second chance when the evening’s conversations and discussion are broadcast by North by Northwest on CBC Radio One 690, on Saturday, October 27th between 8 and 9 am.

Manguel is a strikingly erudite polymath who seems able, in support of his answer to a question from the audience, to instantly extract a perfectly apropos passage from any one of the many books that he has read, no matter how long ago the reading, no matter how obscure the book. It is an impressive feat to witness Manguel construct his carefully considered responses (and he is the only one I can think of who, while apparently speaking off the cuff, speaks not simply in well-formed sentences, but in polished paragraphs, with every punctuation mark in place). He speaks deliberately—and I think this point is key—giving the listener’s ear sufficient time to gather up the idea being expressed without the loss of a single clause. It is as if a spinner and skein-winder were in perfect synchrony, and it is deeply satisfying for listeners, particularly in an era when conversations are more often characterized by people talking over each other and interrupting; as if each participant in such a “conversation” had lost all hope of being listened to attentively and is now determined to at least have his say at any cost (the volume of his voice leap-frogging over that of his conversational opponent) whether he be heard or not.

Manguel gave two readings during the CBC taping session, the first an extract from his new book The City of Words (the published version of this year’s series of Massey lectures, which are even now in progress). Manguel later read a section from The Library at Night, which he prefaced by describing the pleasure of finally having sufficient space in the library of his new home in France to have all 35000 of his books on shelves; or almost all of them: there was also an aphoristic comment to the effect that “every library is always too small for the number of books you own.”

The main problem I have with this evening’s event is that, despite the name—the Studio One Book Club—it bore not the slightest resemblance to any book club gathering that I have ever been a part of. Discussions at our book club are much closer to the “conversations” described above, and I think it grossly unfair of Mssrs MacKay, Burns, and Manguel to have colluded in the fantastic deception which was this evening’s taping; in so doing they have raised unrealistic hopes—of civilized conversations, wide-ranging discussions which connect contemporary issues to a rich and literate past—which I am fairly certain I will never see fulfilled.