Borges and Me: An Encounter

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 declare...