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Maybe someday
49
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
64/100Critics
34/100Scholars
Author:
Jay Parini
Publisher:
Doubleday
Date:
August 18, 2020
An apprentice writer has an entirely unexpected encounter with literary genius Jorge Luis Borges that will profoundly alter his life and work.
What The Reviewers Say
This resistance is a fine narrative stroke. It allows him to recreate their encounter as an inconvenience rather than a privilege. A callow poet, hungry for guidance, is cluelessly alone with one of the most formidable writers of the 20th century; his task is to open his eyes and discover the blind man’s brilliance. Parini wonderfully describes Borges as he experiences him, free of reverence or awe.
These people and events are real, though the book they appear in, ostensibly a memoir, reads much more like a novel, filled with lively characters and satisfying story arcs, but with little of the roughness of real life.
Parini weaves a brilliant narrative touching on Borges’s singular writing style, the effects of aging on the author (Borges was around 70 and blind when Parini met him), and the workings of a perpetually active mind as seen through the lens of Borges’s literary reality. The resulting portraiture of the two men further boasts passages of somewhat oddly placed profanity and allusions to the lives of other writers and poets such as Walt Whitman. Parini’s cook even makes an appearance, comfortably fitting into a narrative reflecting Borges’s ficto-historical sensibility.
... Parini’s partly fictionalised memoir, Borges and Me, presents a Scotland infected and inflected by Borges as well as a Borges infected and inflected by Scotland.
