A romp of a read - a lightly fictionalised account of Parini's encounter with Borges: a writer whose work I, like Parini, have never (so far) read. Jay Parini, an American, was a post-graduate student at St. Andrew's University, dodging the draft to the Vietnam War. He's going through young-man-angst about the subject for his thesis (his supervisor doesn't seem keen on Parini's choice of poet Mackay Brown), his draft-dodging and his (lack of) love life. When a friend of his, Alistair, is called out of town on a family emergency, Parini is called in to house-sit Alistair's guest, the blind and elderly post-modernist writer Borges. Almost immediately, at Borges' request, they embark on a road trip round Scotland for which Parini is expected to be Borges' 'eyes'. Shambolic and unpredictable, Borges is also a fount of dizzying literary talk. This is a trip to savour. A book which is a funny and wry account of an unlikely and thoroughly Quixotic journey: indeed Borges names Parini's ancient Morris Minor after Quixote's horse Rocinante. And it's persuaded me too, that it's about time I read some of Borges' writing.
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QUe decir es muy Borgeano, lo que para mi es un gran elogio. El autor, también escritor y poeta escribe, recuerda y ficciona su encuentro con Borges a principio de los 70 en Escocia, con quien hace un viaje iniciático por las Highlands escocesas. Desde Stirling, Culloden y el lago Ness, da pie para que juegue con un Borges muy Borgeano . recomendable ( )

It is 1971 and the Vietnam War has cast a shadow over the youth, gathering up many in its grasp. Jay's friend Billy is entrapped but Jay has no interest in giving his life to a conflict he thinks his wrong. With this in mind he decides to pursue his master's at St. Andrews in Scotland.

We learn of his life and of his parents, and his mother's quest to keep him from going. All for nought as he soon becomes embroiled in Scottish life and a girl he admired. His thesis subject on Mackay Brown, a still living lost, leads him to Alastair who becomes his friend and mentor. It is through him that he meets a now blind Borges. When Alastair and his young son need to leave due to a family emergency, Jay is asked to stay, for the week, with Borges. Borges though has other plans and requests that he be taken on a trip through the Scottish Highlands.

This follows and often humorous and invigorating trip through wonderful scenery and Scottish history. As Jay has to describe everything to Borges we too as readers experience start they see. Visiting Loch Ness, the Cairgorns, the battlefield at Culligan and Sterling Castle of William Wallace came. Borges is entertaing, clever with a mind and voice that speaks in poetic quotes and phrases.

This was a marvelous book, both a travelogue and a personal look at a revered man.

Some Borges quotes from the book.

"Great reader are scarce, more difficult to find than great writers."

"This is one of the benefits of extreme age. Nothing matters much, and very little matters."

"One must have a reason for doing things. Otherwise it's like a windmill beating the air."

And a poem of his on his blindness which is not included in the book
.
Jorge Luis Borges
On His Blindness
In the fullness of the years, like it or not,
a luminous mist surrounds me, unvarying,
that breaks things down into a single thing,
colourless, formless. Almost into thought.
The elemental, vast night and the day
teeming with people have become the fog
of constant, tentative light that does not flag,
and lies in wait at dawn. I longed to see
just once a human face. Unknown to me
the closed encyclopaedia, the sweet play
in volumes I can do no more than hold,
the tiny soaring birds, the moons of gold.
Others have the world, for better or worse;
I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse.
Jorge Luis Borges.

Now I want to read the authors book on Robert Frost. Maybe sometime this year. ( )

I had high expectations for this story, especially since the author dangled an eventual meeting of Borges with George Mackay Brown, a rustic Orkney poet. It didn't help that the author had neither read nor heard of Borges. Other distractions are the author's preoccupation with the Vietnam War draft and losing his virginity. And then there is a whirl of other characters, interesting in their own right but creating drag on the velocity of the story. It all falls into place in the afterword when the author reveals that he wrote the book in order to get a movie deal. Nevertheless, there are a lot of delightful anecdotes about Borges the man. ( )

Borges and Me by Jay Parini

A charming, enchanting addition to the anthology of books about Borges.

Jay Parini, a Professor of Literature at Middlebury College describes his book as, An Encounter. A son of Scranton, Pennsylvania, upon graduation from college he seeks a graduate program at St. Andrews, Scotland. He is there to pursue an interest in poetry in addition to avoiding the pressures put upon him by his local draft board; it is 1970 and his best friend, Billy, a medic in Vietnam has enlightened Perini’s already existent resistance to the war.

Parini takes up with Alistair Reid, a Scottish poet who is also a translator and friend of Borges. Reid possesses a large personality, a raconteur, he enjoys cooking with a specialty for hash brownies. We follow the young graduate student as he explores his own poetry and graduate thesis work.

Reid, expecting a visit from Borges, is called off on an emergency to London right around the time Borges is arriving for a planned visit. He asks Jay to keep company with the Argentine poet, of whom Jay Parini has never heard of. Borges’ asks Jay to take a motor trip to Inverness where he has corresponded with a Mr. Singleton, an expert in Anglo-Saxon riddles.

The resultant road trip is most revealing. As a reader who has a good deal of knowledge about Borges I found myself getting to know the maestro in a whole new way through the daily habits, mannerisms, thought processes and personal interactions the two of them experience.

The journey has several calamities and humorous moments: unaided the blind Borges suffers a mild concussion as he wanders along a roadside, Borges talks Parini into a rowboat ride on the Loch Ness and in his excitement the great poet capsizes the boat and then tells the tale how the Grendel/monster caused the mishap, we hear about some awkward moments as it relates to Borges’s urination and eating habits, Mr. Singleton, the riddle expert, they discover does live in Inverness-only it is the other one in New Zealand, and , most of all, we get a first hand glimpse of Borges's encyclopedic knowledge and enthusiasm for all things literate, a master of extravagant statements in Latin, English and Spanish-

As Parini describes him: “the unstoppable Borges, who would say whatever he thought whenever he thought it, running along siderails of speculation with a kind of signature compulsiveness. No feeling went unexpressed for long. No thought searched in vain for matching words. If anything, Borges was language itself."

An additional theme are the parallel unrequited loves for both the older Borges and the still naïve Parini. Borges obsesses over his first love, Norah Lange, while Jay dawdles over his infatuations with a fellow coed and the daughter of an Inn keeper they stay at for a night. Borges continues to implore Parini to be bold and take action which eventual he does to great success.

Jay Parini also exhibits his own acquired wisdom and sensibilities. His struggle resolving his relationship to the Vietnam War and his buddy’s Billy service there are triggered when he and Borges visit the battlefield of Culloden, where the Scottish Prince Charles went down in defeat to the English. There they witness a reenactment where Borges is described as “a full grown toddler on the loose”. Parini writes:

“Battlefields had figured in my dreams since childhood. I had taken a trip to Gettysburg with my father when I was very young, not yet twelve. That experience cut a blistering hole in memory, with the thought of blood-soaked corpses, some of them boys only five or six years older than I was. One would have guessed that Americans has learned something about the futility of war by now, and how it rarely advances the cause of humanity. Wouldn’t slavery had petered out in a few years? Weren’t the decades of so-called Reconstruction as bad as slavery itself, creating battle lines between the races that had yet to fade? We had recently suffered the bitter blandishments and compulsive lies of George Wallace, a sociopathic fool who had forged a political career from the populist scraps of resentment that continued to plague America more than a century after the Civil war.”

And as he thought of his good friend Billy in the jungles of Vietnam:

“War was always the last choice for any nation, an admission of defeat. One should never enter a conflict with a sense of triumph, with the slightest jubilance. A war is an enormous funeral, and one should proceed sadly into battle, in humility, with a bowed head, fully aware that one might never be forgiven. I knew I’d never for a second approve of any rhetoric about war that verged on the exultant. There was no glory in war, only shame for having lacked the imagination to prevent this stumble into the abyss.”

Borges, too, comments as they watch the reenactors march on Culloden, as they replay the past for pleasure: “what a marvelous [endeavor]. You mirror reality! And this is what I do for a profession. Hold little mirrors to the world, I do, but they’re untrustworthy. Like all mirrors, prone to distortion…I’ve found a name for myself. Borges, the Reenactor! The problem is, one never wins old battles. The losses only mount.”

And to Parini, who wants to become a writer Borges adds: “you wish to write, I know. Remember that the battle between good and evil persists, and the writer’s work is constantly to reframe the argument, so that readers make the right choices. Never work from vanity, like our Bonnie Prince…what does Eliot say? ‘Humility is endless’…We fail, and we fail again. We pick ourselves up. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

As the encounter, as Parini characterizes this time in his life, ends, Billy is killed in Vietnam, Parini finds love requited and Borges has fallen in love with the Highlands. As Borges prepares to return home Alistair Reid and Jay Parini sum up the time spent with the master:

Reid says, “he’s a magician, a sorcerer, a fraud, and a genius”.
Parini adds, ‘and a priest.”
“That, too”, Reid agrees, “Borges makes these perfect little texts, essays that are stories. It’s all poetry, a kind of spell. After reading Borges, if you miss a train, the event will feel drenched with meaning…Literature, after Borges, must change”.

Parini writes about Borges, what many of his avid readers have also discovered:

“there was something persistently odd and inscrutable about the way he spoke. Was it a problem of translation, or had he cultivated this opaqueness? Or was it translucence? Light filtered through the mask of Borges: a pale yellow glow with its own 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.”

I have read a few other personal memoirs about Borges: Alberto Manguel’s With Borges, Seven Conversations with Borges by Fernando Sorrentino and Conversation with Borges by Richard Burgin, but I must say that Jay Parini’s book, Borges and Me, is a standout; a unique tale about a young poet and a master poet exchanging their thoughts, hopes, fears and enchantments with one another.

So, there you have it. A marvelous read about the great Argentine maestro, Jorge Luis Borges. ( )