The Argentinian-born bibliophile Alberto Manguel was on spiky form on the second day of the ZEE Jaipur literature festival, laying into Amazon and his fellow Latin American Paulo Coelho during a discussion placidly titled The Library at Night. He revealed that he regarded his own library of 35,000 to 40,000 books, housed in an old presbytery in rural France, as a type of autobiography.



A personal library offers a portrait of a person, he joked. “If I go into someone’s house and see more Plato than Aristotle I see a friend. If I see the works of Paulo Coelho I have great trouble regarding [my host] as a friend.”



The electronic text had more or less eliminated the hierarchy of literature, he added. “It makes no distinction between Coelho and Shakespeare.” Indeed, “Amazon suggested that the books that will be remembered will be those of Coelho, so buy books from independent bookstores.”



His own relationship with books was an amorous one, he said. “they name my deepest fears, my most secret emotions and my most ardent passions and tell me what I don’t know I know. In the same way as I don’t believe in virtual sex, I don’t believe in virtual reading.”



He was more complimentary about the reading skills of totalitarian dictators. “Sometimes the best readers are the censors,” he said. “In Chile, Pinochet banned Don Quixote because he saw it as a defence of civil liberties, and he was absolutely right: he recognised its fundamental subversiveness.”