Books About Borges
DiscussionsSouth American Fiction-Argentine Writers
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1berthirsch
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.
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.
2berthirsch
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 Conversations 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.
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 Conversations 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.
3lriley
I'll have to put that one on the X-mas list Bert---sounds like a fun book. The one thing I'll differ with Parini on though is no I don't think slavery would have petered out any time soon.
4zo_ey
I have spent many hours of my college life pouring over essays about Jorge Luis Borges. It was part of my group work, but since then I never went back to any of his work. This discussion has me intrigued - I want to read the Jay Parini book. Thanks!
5berthirsch
>3 lriley: let me know.
7berthirsch
Just read that the Borges bio by his friend and confidante, Bioy Casares will be published in English in 2021.
8Rise
There's a short book Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. It's ficciones, by the way.
It's a very funny, entertaining, and refreshing whodunit, with more than passing references to Borges (a major character here), Poe, and Lovecraft. Vogelstein is a 50-year old translator and English teacher who adored Borges with the same fanatical zeal as the narrator of the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." His first "encounter" with the master was not agreeable: Vogelstein translated one of Borges's stories for a Portuguese magazine but he changed some aspects of the story to fit his own preference for how the story should proceed. Of course, Borges, upon learning of the travesty, was furious. They eventually exchanged letters, which was the start of Vogelstein's literary hero worship.
Their second encounter was face to face, in a conference about Edgar Allan Poe held in Buenos Aires. But even before the conference was to start, a murder of one of the speakers took place. The murder victim was found, in true Borgesian fashion, in front of a mirror – his body's position was such that it formed a letter from the alphabet, a clue that could point to the solution of the crime. Borges and Vogelstein were enlisted to help uncover the identity of the killer. The ensuing investigation was a riot of literary speculations, invoking the mystery stories of Poe, the Kabbalah, Necronomicon book of the dead, et cetera. This novel was criminally funny. I'm sure there were some in-jokes (Borgian, Poe-ic, Lovecrafty) that went past me, but it was altogether a solid detective work, if a bit too neat the way it all tied up, in a postmodern postmortem, in the end. Verissimo was nonetheless guilty of leading the reader into a maze of intertextual pleasures. There's a chance that a fan of Borges or Poe or Lovecraft will revel in the games and gimmickry of the Brazilian writer Luis Fernando Verissimo.
It's a very funny, entertaining, and refreshing whodunit, with more than passing references to Borges (a major character here), Poe, and Lovecraft. Vogelstein is a 50-year old translator and English teacher who adored Borges with the same fanatical zeal as the narrator of the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." His first "encounter" with the master was not agreeable: Vogelstein translated one of Borges's stories for a Portuguese magazine but he changed some aspects of the story to fit his own preference for how the story should proceed. Of course, Borges, upon learning of the travesty, was furious. They eventually exchanged letters, which was the start of Vogelstein's literary hero worship.
Their second encounter was face to face, in a conference about Edgar Allan Poe held in Buenos Aires. But even before the conference was to start, a murder of one of the speakers took place. The murder victim was found, in true Borgesian fashion, in front of a mirror – his body's position was such that it formed a letter from the alphabet, a clue that could point to the solution of the crime. Borges and Vogelstein were enlisted to help uncover the identity of the killer. The ensuing investigation was a riot of literary speculations, invoking the mystery stories of Poe, the Kabbalah, Necronomicon book of the dead, et cetera. This novel was criminally funny. I'm sure there were some in-jokes (Borgian, Poe-ic, Lovecrafty) that went past me, but it was altogether a solid detective work, if a bit too neat the way it all tied up, in a postmodern postmortem, in the end. Verissimo was nonetheless guilty of leading the reader into a maze of intertextual pleasures. There's a chance that a fan of Borges or Poe or Lovecraft will revel in the games and gimmickry of the Brazilian writer Luis Fernando Verissimo.
9berthirsch
>8 Rise: one immediate in-joke may refer to Borges' famous story, the Aleph. Borges and Bioy Casares also wrote detective stories under the pseudonym, Francisco Bustos. The detective's name was Don Isidro Parodi.
(parody...ha ha).
the novel you mentioned sounds like fun and I will put it on my lsit.
My favorite Borges stores: Funes-His memory, Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius, The Aleph, The Library of Babel.
(parody...ha ha).
the novel you mentioned sounds like fun and I will put it on my lsit.
My favorite Borges stores: Funes-His memory, Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius, The Aleph, The Library of Babel.
10lilithcat
YIVO is doing a course on Borges & the Jews: https://yivo.org/WP2021-Stavans
11berthirsch
>10 lilithcat: I am a big fan of Stavans. I expect the class will be top notch.
12zo_ey
>6 berthirsch: The 'Library of Babel' (I think that was what it was called) has stayed with me.
13berthirsch
His stories do have a haunting quality.
