This book about a young aspiring writer may discourage you from pursuing such a profession. If you are a young person thinking about becoming a writer, you should be warned. 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. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn.īorges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. 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. 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. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.īorges - visiting his translator in Scotland - is in his 70s, blind and frail.
In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kind of novelistic memoir”, Jay Parini takes us back 50 years, when he fled the United States for Scotland - in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life.
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