If you ask me …
The Guardian, 27th
April 2003
We ask writers to nominate
the most underrated and overrated books. This week writer/director Michael
Pennington
I know virtually no one who has read this magical
and scholarly book. Did you know that one Vizier of Persia always travelled
with 117,000 books carried by 400 camels walking alphabetically, or that our
eyes jump wildly around the page four times a second as we read? Manguel’s
celebration closes with a photograph of the bombed-out library of Holland
House, three men still standing in it choosing books; they are not so much
ignoring the war as persisting against all odds in their right to be
astonished.
Supposedly sluiced away with out other guilty
secrets from the 1970s, this still sells enough to qualify as overrated. To
think we believed that when you work you are a flute through which the
whispering hours turn to music, or that our children are only lent to us… speak
to us, O Master, of mixed metaphor, specious paradox, phoney lyricism and hazy
thinking, speak to us of tosh.
Michael Pennington
is currently directing ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for the Regent’s Park Open
Air Theatre and will appear in ‘The Seagull’ at the Edinburgh Festival.