BORGES AND ME

The renowned biographer, novelist, and poet recounts his transformative youthful journey with a famed literary master.

In 1971, when he was a graduate student at St. Andrews University in Scotland, Parini took two short journeys—here combined into one weeklong trip in order to maintain “narrative efficiency”—in the company of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who was visiting one of Parini’s mentors. At the time, Parini had not read anything Borges had written, and he was surprised that his friends not only knew of the Argentine writer, but held him in the highest esteem. At first, Parini saw Borges only as a garrulous, “difficult and self-involved” old man, given to nostalgic memories of a lost love and disquisitions on an astonishing range of literature. He needed constant attention due to his blindness and constant acquiescence to his impetuous needs. Still, Parini agreed to squire Borges around the Scottish Highlands, serving as his guide, aide, and, especially, his eyes. Parini delivers vibrant descriptions of clouds and rain, earth and sun: “the bright lakes, the fertile land with stone barns and hillsides smudged with white-and-gray sheep,” the oaks with crooked limbs, and the dark waters of Loch Ness, in which their rowboat capsized. Parini decided that one should never take a “childlike, irascible, and unpredictable” old blind man in a rowboat. But by the end of their travels together, Parini realized that Borges was extraordinary: a man who glowed with “an enigmatic brilliance. One felt somehow more intelligent, more learned and witty, in his presence. The universe itself felt more pliable and yielding, and so available.” Parini’s vividly detailed memoir, replete with verbatim conversations, is the result of much shaping and retelling, first in fragments over the years, later as a novel, and then as “a kind of novelistic memoir,” which, Parini writes, “survives in its transformation into this text.”

A captivating chronicle and homage.