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  • Cuando los lectores nos susurran: Libros, lecturas, bibliotecas, sociedad y prácticas editoriales en la Argentina
  • Nicolas Shumway
Cuando los lectores nos susurran: Libros, lecturas, bibliotecas, sociedad y prácticas editoriales en la Argentina. By Alejandro E. Parada. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliotecológicas Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2007. 220 pp. $28.00 (paper). ISBN 950-29-0960-0.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that “in literature as in other spheres, every act crowns an infinite series of causes and causes an infinite series of effects.” In this new book, Cuando los lectores nos susurran: Libros, lecturas, bibliotecas, sociedad y prácticas editoriales en la Argentina, Alejandro E. Parada gives ample evidence of Borges’s observation as he examines key moments and figures in Argentine bibliophilia. More than a history of the book or of reading, Parada’s work touches on stories of people who write, read, publish, sell, lend, collect, borrow, and talk about books. It is thus a book about relationships that, through informal and sometimes formal networks, allow writing, reading, and publishing to take place—activities that both shape and are shaped by communities. The seductive title of this book—Cuando los lectores nos susurran (When Readers Whisper to Us)—calls attention to the generations of readers who were both cause and effect of book publishing in Argentina and also to ourselves, as we are also cause and effect of unseen generations of readers who preceded and will no doubt follow us. It is as Borges says.

In his introduction Parada states that this book is not a history of reading in Argentina but merely a contribution to certain “aspectos” of that history (15). While literally true, this modest opening should not suggest that the book is a modest accomplishment. Rather, it is an illuminating, highly engaging set of six essays, focused on six discrete historical periods, with a concluding essay on the fate of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote in Argentina. What unites the several chapters is Parada’s attempt to look past the book lists, the catalogs, and the sales tallies in order to hear the readers who whisper to us from beyond the tangible evidence.

The book opens with an extraordinary chapter on book collecting in the River Plate region during the colonial period. Not surprisingly, Parada shows that the largest colonial libraries were linked to the Catholic Church. Yet he shows that private institutions, often run by foreign-born communities, also collected books and made these widely available, allowing some inhabitants of the area to be “fully immersed” in the culture of reading (45).

Chapters 2 and 3 address the profound changes in book culture that accompanied (and to some degree contributed to) Argentina’s struggle for independence and its emergence as an independent, albeit highly fraught, new country. The year 1810 saw Buenos Aires’s first gestures toward independence, fed by liberal ideals that entered Argentina through a lively and occasionally illegal book trade. Only two years later, in 1812, Buenos Aires created the Biblioteca Pública, primarily from donated books. This was the first of many libraries in Buenos Aires, which Parada tries to organize according to type and function. He provides a fascinating list of not only book titles but also the sources of the donations, many of which came from church libraries and the personal collections of priests, thus undermining a popular myth that the church opposed independence. Truth be told, while the Vatican challenged the independence movement and continued to oppose its liberal underpinnings for decades to come, individual priests contributed importantly to both the independence struggle and early attempts to build a liberal state. In Parada’s words, the end of the decade saw a new “cosmopolitan, complex, and heterogeneous” culture emerge as new generations of readers claimed access to books (77). [End Page 491]

Chapter 3 continues this story into the following decade, 1820–30, when Buenos Aires developed a reading culture that to some degree still defines this extraordinarily cosmopolitan city. Parada’s extensive research documents how Buenos Aires intellectuals sought to make their city not merely a cultural outpost of Europe but a capital of Western culture. The...

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