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Borges and Me: An Encounter - Softcover

Parini, Jay

 
9781984899491: Borges and Me: An Encounter
Softcover
ISBN 10: 198489949X ISBN 13: 9781984899491
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

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. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges—visiting his translator in Scotland—is in his seventies, blind and frail. When Borges hears that Parini owns a 1957 Morris Minor, he declares a long-held wish to visit the Highlands, where he hopes to meet a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn.

Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical mystery 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College. He has written eight novels, including The Damascus Road, Benjamin’s Crossing, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H.M., and The Last Station, the last made into an Academy Award–nominated film. His biographical subjects include John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and, most recently, Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include Jesus: The Human Face of God, Why Poetry Matters, and Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.

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Chapter 1

One June morning in 1986, at my farmhouse in Vermont, I stepped from bed as the sun had only just lifted an eyebrow over the Green Mountains: always a coveted moment in my day, when I lean into beginnings, thinking about the work ahead of me—in this case, a novel about the last days of Tolstoy that had begun to glimmer at the edges of my conscious mind. My wife and children were still asleep, and I couldn’t help but look at them fondly. How could I resist these sweet little boys who drove me nuts at times, as children must do, as it’s their job? Or a bright, affectionate wife who didn’t seem to mind my occasional flights of idiocy, offering a rueful smile at times, sometimes a deep laugh? This bounty felt undeserved and probably was. With a sense of gratitude, even amazement, I made my way downstairs into the country kitchen, where I brewed a strong cup of Irish Breakfast tea for myself before going into my study at the other end of the house.

As I often did before settling at the stained trestle table that still anchors my study, I turned on the radio to catch the headlines, tuning into the BBC on a shortwave radio that my old friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, had recently given to me as a gift for my thirty-eighth birthday. When the newscaster read the day’s top stories, I was stunned to hear that Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer “who blended fact and fiction in a peerless sequence of narratives that defied all boundaries and set off the Boom in Latin American literature,” had died in Geneva at the age of eighty-six. “He was a man of many stories,” the announcer said. “As a writer, he explored the most idiosyncratic spaces in the human experience, a lover of labyrinths and mirrors, a shapeshifting writer who could never be defined.”

Memories surfaced now. I had met Borges when I was a graduate student many years before, in Scotland, and traveled with him from St. Andrews to the Highlands and back. Our encounter lasted only a week or so, but it forced a shift in me, a change of perspective, hitting me at just the right time. And all I knew for sure was that my way of being in the world was never quite the same after Borges.

Standing at the window, I looked into the garden below at a bed of Oriental poppies, the blood-bright cheeks of the flowers turning toward me. Did they notice my stinging eyes? I thought so, and stepped away from the window. I’m not someone who cries easily, but I wept that day. Weeping as much for myself as for Borges, remembering the callow, overly serious, shy, and often terrified fellow I was when we met, trying to weigh this against the man I’d become, still wondering what on earth had happened to me in Scotland some fifteen years before.

—

In 1970, having just graduated from Lafayette College and moved (briefly, I hoped) back in with my parents in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I saw two choices: stay at home, where my mother would chop off my balls, or go to Vietnam, where they’d be blown off by a landmine. A third choice, less apparent at first but finally obvious, was to leave the United States altogether, getting as far away as possible. The place that called to me was a small town on the East Neuk of Fife, in Scotland.

St. Andrews had already provided me with a much-needed escape and given me a feeling of vocation, as I’d studied there for my junior year abroad. During a memorable year, I’d made friends easily, much to my surprise, mixing with Scottish and English students, befriending a handful of Continental students, too. The lectures I attended were often appealing—florid rhetorical performances of a kind unfamiliar to me—and I’d learned a good deal, especially from intense one-on-one tutorials with a range of eccentric but erudite teachers. (One of them held tutorials at his ramshackle flat, where his wife served us tea wearing a face mask as she was “sensitive to germs.”)

Most important, in Scotland I’d begun to write, recording my daily life in a journal, which I hoped (mentally cribbing a phrase from Robert Lowell) would shimmer with “the grace of accuracy.” No detail seemed too inconsequential to record, and I often filled pages with quotations from things I’d read or recorded snippets of conversation I’d overheard in tea shops or pubs. I also began to write my own poems. They were imitative and unmemorable, as one might expect, but this was a thrilling turn. I’d decided—for reasons based on no demonstrable talent or experience—to make a profession of writing.

I thought I knew quite a bit about literature, though I had a skim of learning, the lightest froth on a cup which was not even an especially big cup. Nonetheless, I’d begun to read with a sense of urgency. I gulped more than read books like Walden and Leaves of Grass, The Great Gatsby and Look Homeward, Angel. I scooped up Hesse, Woolf, Kerouac, Lawrence, McCullers, Nabokov, Beckett, and others. In libraries I leafed eagerly through the large, crisp pages of The New York Review of Books, drawn to provocative pieces by the likes of Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag. I attended readings by writers, some of them famous (Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey, Paul Goodman), and felt quite sure that literature would provide access to worlds far beyond Scranton.

I set my sights on graduate study in St. Andrews, though I knew it would be a battle to persuade my parents that this sort of move made sense. I was my mother’s first child, and she had been possessive from the first breath I drew. (My sister, Dorrie, was two years behind me, and her being a girl did not make it any easier with my mother, to put it mildly.) I was “backward,” my mother frequently said, which meant I was frightened by strangers, put off by everyone and everything. As a baby, I screamed whenever somebody unfamiliar stepped into the room. Only my mother could comfort me, and she encouraged this dependence. It wasn’t intentionally smothering, I suspect, but the results were the same. Needless to say, I would have great difficulty separating from her. Adulthood seemed a far, impossible kingdom.

My mother all but had a nervous breakdown when I left for Scotland the first time. “You’re going where?” she asked. “Scotland? Are you crazy? Nobody goes to Scotland!” The night before my first departure, in 1968, she hurled herself onto the bed in the hotel in New York in a state of emotional disarray. Her bitter wailing kept me awake in the adjacent room throughout the night, and she looked exhausted when she said goodbye to me at the docks the next morning, hardly uttering a word. I sailed away to Britain on a rickety Italian liner that she told me “was unstable and would probably sink.” It’s no wonder I wept quietly in my bunk on that low-rent ship on the eight-day journey from New York to Southampton. This was a kind of weaning for me, as I now see. I was shedding my old life as best I could. I could easily imagine my mother crying herself to sleep in Scranton, night after night, but I steeled myself, knowing that I had to go through whatever lay before me, no matter how painful.

My father was a genial worrywart, the son of Italian immigrants who spoke very little English and could offer their five sons few advantages beyond bowls of handmade linguini and homegrown vegetables. (My grandmother shot rabbits from her back porch and turned them into ragu.) Like many of his generation, children of the Great Depression, my father suffered from a pervasive cautiousness. The sidewalks of his mind were strewn with banana peels. He had been forced to leave high school well before graduating, but with a bit of luck and grit he made his...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
198489949X
ISBN 13 
9781984899491
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
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