![]() ![]() There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.īorges-visiting his translator in Scotland-is in his seventies, blind and frail. 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 States for Scotland-in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. If you love language, literature, Scotland, or just a great coming-of-age road novel, this is one of those happy books that makes you want to be a more ambitious reader and embrace life’s unexpected opportunities. ![]() Although, in many ways, the turmoil of the early 70s reverberates today, there is something wonderfully distracting, and uplifting, in this account of a simpler time when you could jump into your rusted out Morris Minor, with barely more than a toothbrush, and head for the hills (and islands) on a whim. Filled with wonderful characters and gorgeous descriptions of the rugged countryside, whether this work is fiction or memoir is just part of the fun (and part of the point) as Parini takes us on an enchanted trip that provides an intimate and endearing portrait of an enigmatic genius of post-modern literature. ![]() Early in his program, through a string of unlikely coincidences, Parini is cajoled into chaperoning the visiting, blind, and elderly Jorge Luis Borges on a literary quest into the Highlands. In the early 1970s, adrift and fearful of the Vietnam draft, Jay Parini talks his way into the PhD program in literature at St. ![]()
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