Aug 04, 2020 | ISBN 9780385545822
Aug 04, 2020 | 660 Minutes
“This is a jewel of a book. Very funny, clever, moving, luminous with love of literature and landscape. Jay Parini’s portrait of both Borges and Scotland is exquisite, deeply affectionate, sometimes comically irritable. 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. And all his constant demands. My laughter (at poor Parini’s long night in bed with his subject) kept my wife awake. 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
“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. I loved every minute of reading it. It’s full of wonderful energy and humor, with underpinnings of sadness and seriousness I can’t shake.” —Ann Beattie
“A tender bond forms between the eccentric sage and his caretaker. . .Fans of both Borges and Parini will delight in this touching coming-of-age memoir. —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“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.” —Kirkus Reviews
