He’s unworldly and wants to be liked - by his mentor, Alastair, and by girls. He gets regular letters from the draft board, and from his friend Billy in Vietnam. He left his possessive mother and worrying father, burdened with guilt about who would go to war instead of him. Jay Parini had enjoyed an undergraduate year in St Andrews and returned to study for a PhD, partly because he did not want to be drafted to Vietnam. However, if you haven’t, you should, regardless of whether you plan to read this!

The characters and situation are wonderfully drawn, and their erudition is worn so lightly, and often playfully, that it would be readable even if, like Jay, you've never heard of Jorge Luis Borges or read his work. “ How on earth had I ended up in bed with a loquacious blind man in a remote village in the Scottish Highlands?” With this novelistic memoir, Jay Parini has demonstrated the truth of his mentor’s analogy. You bring various distinct elements together. “ Cooking and writing are the perfect combination… They’re elemental. This was like a soufflé: delicate and irresistible, but requiring great skill to achieve: It was a joy to spend a week with 22-year old Jay and 72-year old Borges on their improbable 1971 road trip around literary and historic sites of Scotland in a clapped-out Morris Minor. What ensued was a seriocomic romp across the Scottish landscape that Borges insisted he must 'see,' all the while declaiming and reciting from the literary encyclopedia that was his head, and Jay Parini's eventual reckoning with his vocation and personal fate.

About whom Jay Parini knew precisely nothing. He agreed-and that 'writer' turned out to be the blind and aged and eccentric master of literary compression and metaphysics, Jorge Luis Borges.

One day his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, asked Jay if he could play host for a 'visiting Latin American writer' while he attended to business in London. In 1971 Jay Parini was an aspiring poet and graduate student of literature at University of St Andrews in Scotland he was also in flight from being drafted into service in the Vietnam War. A poignant and comic literary coming-of-age memoir. An apprentice writer has an entirely unexpected encounter with literary genius Jorge Luis Borges that will profoundly alter his life and work.

Borges and Me by Jay Parini