A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel

Author:Alberto Manguel [Manguel, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37026-6
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2005-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

What did I do about any of this?

I feel like Mittler, the fifth character in Elective Affinities, the outsider who, on the one hand, will not “waste his time in any household where there was no help to give and no quarrel to resolve,” and, on the other, haughtily refuses to help out his best friends. Even though he fails, he seems to me to be a worthy Mittler (the word means “mediator”). “Those who are superstitious about names,” we are told, “maintain that the name Mittler had obligated him to take on this strangest of all vocations.” If so, my name would echo perhaps my countless Mangeln (“faults” in German), if Mangelhaftigkeit (“inadequacy”) is my lot. The English etymology is kinder, associating my name with “among” or “a person among many”—in other words, one of Dr. Johnson’s “common readers.”

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