Alberto Manguel @ EIBF

 

When Alberto Manguel entered the Corner Theatre on Tuesday, there can’t have been more than fifteen of us, spread out like islands in a baffled archipelago, none of us sure why this towering figure in contemporary world letters hadn’t drawn more of a crowd. The answer was technical – the event was a late addition to the festival so hadn’t made it into the programme. Lucky for us, as it turned out, because what ensued was an energetic, stimulating and intimate conversation, in which all the audience (outlying islands having drifted forward) were involved, and which ranged from Cocteau, to Dante, Borges, Beckett, Nabokov, and many more besides. The focus was on Manguel’s new novel, the provocatively titled All Men are Liars, which features Manguel as a prominent character, though unrecognisably fictionalised. It’s a tricky novel that intriguingly undermines the certainty of its title. Manguel’s dazzling erudition was ably steered by chair Andrew Franklin, a task not wholly enviable given the writer’s penchant for counter-intuitive, quizzical utterances like “translation is the only truth” and “I find it hard to remember who I was the day before”. After an hour of this, I think we all found it pretty hard too. [Alberto Manguel]