…in this week’s New Yorker:
François-Michel Messud, the author’s father-in-law, was born in France, but spent his early childhood nomadically, in Beirut, Istanbul, and Salonica, before the family settled in Algiers. In the early nineteen-fifties, he came to America, as one of the first Fulbright scholars, and stayed on to do graduate work in Middle Eastern studies. He married Margaret Riches, from Toronto, and the young couple spent their early years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tribes and societies interested him because he grew up in a tribe, left it for a society, and belonged to neither.
He acquired far more books than he could read. The acquisition of a book signaled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place. Libraries are always paradoxical: they are as personal as the collector, and at the same time are an ideal statement of knowledge that is impersonal, because it is universal, abstract, and so much larger than an individual life. For in any private library, the totality of books is meaningful, while each individual volume is relatively meaningless.
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