The Defender of Stories

Alberto Manguel believes in stories. The City of Words, the book version of his formidably erudite 2007 Massey lectures, is a meditation on the nature and power of storytelling, one written as though from a bunker in the midst of a prolonged battle. Enemies of real stories and real books abound in the dark current times that the author outlines, and they range from the usual suspects—the dead language of politics and advertising, the “limiting imagination of bureaucracies”— to those of the post-9/11 era, including the re-emergence of toxic Us versus Them/Good versus Evil divides. Additionally, there is the Mordor-like overlord of literary late capitalism, with its determination to colonize not only our marketplaces but our actual consciences as well, leading us to only think we are reading the fiction we wish to read. A dark age, indeed.

In his introduction, Manguel declares that his starting point is “less a question than a series of questions, less an...