Borges and Me
An Encounter
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4.8 • 11 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kindof novelistic memoir,” Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland—in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges—visiting his translator in Scotland—is in his seventies, blind and frail. When Borges hears that Parini owns a 1957 Morris Minor, he declares a long-held wish to visit the Highlands, where he hopes to meet a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn.
Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical mystery 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.
