Borges and Me
An Encounter
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- € 8,99
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LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE
In frantic flight from the Vietnam War, Jay Parini leaves the United States for Scotland. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. The pair embark on a trip to the Scottish Highlands, and on the way the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of western literature and ideas while promising to teach him about love and poetry.
Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical tour of an era – like our own – in which uncertainties abound, and when – as ever – it’s the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this astute memoir, novelist Parini (The Last Station) writes of leaving Pennsylvania in 1971 to pursue a PhD in literature at St. Andrews in Scotland. There, he describes himself as the "last 22-year-old virgin in the Age of Aquarius" as he finds his voice as a writer and escapes the draft. He soon falls for antiwar activist Bella Law, who has a boyfriend and is indifferent to Parini's meek advances. Then, after Parini's writing mentor, poet Alastair Reid, asks him to host his houseguest, Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, a one-week ramble through the Scottish Highlands ensues. His mission: to describe the entire trip for the blind writer ("He knew what he wanted to see. Or to have me describe"). Parini also plans to meet his thesis subject, poet George Mackay Brown, on the isle of Orkney, but on the way realizes that Borges, a "batty old man of letters," is a literary jukebox, referring to such literary works as Beowulf (while capsizing their rowboat on Loch Ness) and writers including Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Over the days, a tender bond forms between the eccentric sage and his caretaker. En route to meeting Brown, Parini loses his virginity to a free-spirited innkeeper's daughter, and, newly emboldened, Parini returns to St. Andrews and kindles a relationship with Bella as he matures as an author, writing, "I could sense my own voice emerging." Fans of both Borges and Parini will delight in this touching coming-of-age memoir.
