Wednesday Book: Led by Alice through wonderland

INTO THE LOOKING-GLASS WORLD: ESSAYS ON WORDS AND THE WORLD BY ALBERTO MANGUEL, BLOOMSBURY, pounds 15.99

LEWIS CARROLL was a children's author. Charles Dodgson, now almost as famously, was a Victorian portrait photographer with a penchant for little girls. (He admitted to liking children, as long as they were not boys.) Less curiously to all but those with a strong biographical bent, he taught mathematics at Oxford.

Alberto Manguel, an author without pseudonym but of multiple curiosities and nationalities is not quite as interested as one might expect in the through-the-looking-glass possibilities of children's literature and photography. In fact, the piece in this anthology of essays on writing and reading, "The Blind Photographer", is not about photography at all but fellow Latin American author Mario Vargas Llosa, and how it is "as if, like a sightless photographer, he were blind to the human reality that his lens had so powerfully captured". The bad faith of which the Peruvian stands accused is that of being "an ineffectual reader" - particularly of his own work.

It is not an accusation that can be levelled at Manguel. Author of a copious History of Reading, he forever seeks to forge a synthesis between writer and reader in their joint creative endeavour. He is clearly with Alice, rather than the Red Queen who severely informs us that "nobody can do two things at once, you know".

However, in a modern world that assails all our senses simultaneously, Manguel's writing stands as a cool pool of reflection. He extends to us what he feels that he has most profited by, which is a private space in a world that has too little of it, and an intense relationship that exists between the reader and the writer.

At first sight, his interests appear as daunting as they are extensive. Theology, mythology, culture, history, society, politics, new technology - the big themes haunting our century are re-viewed through a literary lens. It is Manguel's erudite consumption of the literature on these topics that gives an edge to his own work, and his extraordinary ability to make friends of books as well as authors.

This means that his style is never academic, and rarely polemical. It is rich in anecdotes about his relationships with an older generation of authors from his native Argentina; and his more contemporary encounters on the North American literary circuit (including a touching analysis of the eclectic Cynthia Ozick, and a succinct demolition of Bret Easton Ellis). This runs alongside an equally personal involvement in the writings of the Old Testament prophets, Christian saints, and both ancient and modern icons, from Ovid to Che Guevara.

Manguel's own hybrid identity as a Jewish Latin North American who has lived, written and taught for long periods in Europe informs his reading and writing. For this loosely-linked anthology, he has chosen Alice as his guide through the wood, teaching us to examine the trees which compose it. Only Manguel could see Alice at once as the "fawn, one of the hunted", who brings him back to the question at the heart of every book ("Who am I?"); and as the interrogator of the White Knight, whose "careful distinctions between what a name is called, the name itself, what the thing it names is called and the thing itself... are as old as the first commentators of Genesis". Or as new as the latest French post-modernist.

One of the forests Manguel seeks to map is that of "gay literature". As co-editor of an anthology of gay writing, he has a firm line on its vocabulary, including a careful distinction between erotica and pornography, and a less clear one on some of its history. (Sade was a little old to be a true "Son of the Revolution", and was regarded by many revolutionaries as epitomising the worst aspects of aristocratic depravity.) What is astonishing in Manguel's exploration of a corpus of literature is how he approximates it to the body of a beloved person: "It can be a revelation and exalt us, or it can be pornography and immure us." It is an analogy he extends to translation, which can reveal or debase the original coinage. The word "translator", he points out, derives from the Latin transferre meaning to convey the relics of saints.

To Manguel, writing in its myriad forms as translator, author or critic, is a loving and reverential act. As a reader, an amateur in the original sense, and as a professional in his studious exposes, he approaches literature in the same vein. He concludes his essay on GK Chesterton by reverting to the essential collusion between writer and reader: "words, in the end, are all we have to defend ourselves with... the worth of words, like that of our mortal selves, lies in their very fallibility and elegant brittleness - all this Chesterton knew and endlessly recorded. Whether we have the courage to agree with him is, obviously, another matter." Who would dare to deny a Chesterton, and so defy an Alberto Manguel?