First of all, as an autobiographical document, written with a spume similar to the dramatic and amusing stories by John Fante, possible outcome of the mixture of Italian-American blood that unites them. As Parini chronicles their misadventures with the hilarity of hindsight, he palpably re-creates his youthful anxiety and Borges’ own sometimes infuriating sanguinity.This novel by Jay Parini, while displaying true events that occurred fifty years ago, can work from various places. It’s full of wonderful energy and humor, with underpinnings of sadness and seriousness I can’t shake.” -Ann Beattie “ Borges and Me is a road-trip book like no other, written by someone who certainly didn’t spend his youth the way I did. “A captivating chronicle and homage.” - Kirkus Reviews Fans of both Borges and Parini will delight in this touching coming-of-age memoir.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A tender bond forms between the eccentric sage and his caretaker. “One of the great books of our time.” -Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW This reminiscence by Parini, who is now a prolific novelist, biographer and poet, brings Borges more sharply to life than any account I’ve read or heard.” -Michael Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review “A classic comic-philosophical road story, playfully conscious of its own traditions.” - The Wall Street Journal A high-style Borgesianmarriage of fiction and history.” -Ian McEwan
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 seventies, blind and frail. 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.
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