When Borges heard that Parini owned a 1957 Morris Minor, he declared a long-held wish to visit the Scottish Highlands, where he hoped to meet a man in Inverness who was interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. Parini was asked to look after him while his translator was unexpectedly called away. There, through unlikely circumstances, he met famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.īorges was blind, in his seventies and frail. He was in frantic flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. In this evocative work of what the author in his Afterword calls 'autofiction' or 'a kind of novelised memoir', Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland. But by the end, I was damp around the eyes I was sad to let this little cast of characters go.I read it in a greedy gulp.' - Ian McEwan My laughter (at poor Parini's long night in bed with his subject) kept my wife awake. He uses all a novelist's art, all his smoke and mirrors, to let the great man step shambolically from these pages to trap and beguile us, like a modern Ancient Mariner, with his brilliant, freely associative and heady metaphysics and literary table talk. Jay Parini's portrait of both Borges and Scotland is exquisite, deeply affectionate, sometimes comically irritable. Very funny, clever, moving, luminous with love of literature and landscape.
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