![]() ![]() Fifty years ago, as a draft-dodging doctoral student in St Andrews, he met Borges in the flesh. Parini, a US novelist, academic and literary biographer, is not writing from a blank page. Borges and Parini, master and student, driving around the Highlands of Scotland in a battered candy-red Morris Minor, the one blind, the other “shy and often terrified”, both lost in their own mazes, both open to the world. In classic Borgesian style, he opts to write himself into his own drama. Mercifully and rather marvellously, Parini embarks on his task not as a critic but as an actor. Despite its deceptively simple prose, Borges’s work defies ready explanation or – at times – even ready understanding. In this endearing, joyous, sharply written book, Jay Parini sets out to do precisely that: to take up his pen and discuss Borges, winner of multiple prizes and a Latin American literary giant. Or is it Borges from his desk? Either way, “discuss”. “I shall have to imagine other things,” he concludes. In just a few closely packed pages, the Argentinian essayist and master storyteller links the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson with the soul of tigers, via mythological suburbs and arched entrance halls, past strumming guitars and games with infinity, only to lose everything. Erudite and elliptical, succinct and self-referential, passionate and puzzling. ![]() J orge Luis Borges’s short story “Borges and I” is typical of the writer.
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