Borges and Me

 

Another book I've enjoyed this month is Borges and Me by Jay Parini (Canongate 2020) recounting the author's experience, when studying in Scotland in the early 1970s, of driving the protean Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges around that country and the Northern Isles. He had never read any of the author's work at the time and did not appreciate his international fame. Borges was blind and needed Parini to describe in detail the towns and landscapes they were passing through. 

The book is funny, moving and very well written. Parini confesses in the final chapter what the reader has suspected all along - that this could not possibly be a fully accurate account of the encounter as there are long passages of apparently perfectly remembered conversations and monologues from Borges (some of which I think are adapted from his stories). Instead: 'It's a bit of a palimpsest, a text written over another text, with many erasures; the underlying text is barely legible but nonetheless important, its bones poking through the skin. This story was shaped as fiction, or auto fiction, and the residue of that shaping in its transformation into this text, "An Encounter."' There are just too many perfect coincidences - the three 'Weird Sister' 'witches' at a foggy Scone Castle stop for example - enabling Borges to wax lyrical from his formidable literary knowledge. I also dipped into Borges Collected Fictions to reminder me of his unique style. I think I first became aware of Borges when reading Umberto Eco's bestselling The Name of the Rose in the 1980s in which an important character is based on him. I also found the first few chapters about Parini's student life before the arrival of Borges equally absorbing.