Surveying his options of either staying in Scranton or heading off to Vietnam, he settled on a third. In 1970, Parini had received his undergraduate degree from Lafayette College and moved back into his parents’ home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It's also a magical tour of an era - like our own - in which uncertainties abound, and when - as ever - it's the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams. In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls a kindof novelistic memoir, Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United. This is the premise of poet and novelist Jay Parini’s 2020 book, Borges and Me: An Encounter. Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. As Borges's world of labyrinths, mirrors and doubles shimmered into being, their escapades took a surreal turn. When Borges heard that Parini owned a 1957 Morris Minor, he declared a long-held wish to visit the Scottish Highlands, where he hoped to meet a man in Inverness who was interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles.Īs they travelled, the charmingly garrulous Borges took Parini on a grand tour of western literature and ideas while promising to teach him about love and poetry. Parini was asked to look after him while his translator was unexpectedly called away. There, through unlikely circumstances, he met famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.īorges was in his seventies, blind and frail. He was in frantic flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. In this evocative work of what the author in his Afterword calls 'autofiction' or 'a kind of novelised memoir', Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland. The renowned biographer, novelist, and poet recounts his transformative youthful.
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