Borges and Me: An Encounter

In what the author calls a novelistic memoir, he takes readers back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland to avoiding the Vietnam War. Through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges who is in his seventies, blind and frail. Borges shares his long-held wish to find a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. Borges’s world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, and their journey becomes a magical mystery tour.