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Borges and me parini6/25/2023 ![]() ![]() Parini also plans to meet his thesis subject, poet George Mackay Brown, on the isle of Orkney, but on the way realizes that Borges, a “batty old man of letters,” is a literary jukebox, referring to such literary works as Beowulf (while capsizing their rowboat on Loch Ness) and writers including Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. His mission: to describe the entire trip for the blind writer (“He knew what he wanted to see. ![]() ![]() Then, after Parini’s writing mentor, poet Alastair Reid, asks him to host his houseguest, Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, a one-week ramble through the Scottish Highlands ensues. He soon falls for antiwar activist Bella Law, who has a boyfriend and is indifferent to Parini’s meek advances. There, he describes himself as the “last 22-year-old virgin in the Age of Aquarius” as he finds his voice as a writer and escapes the draft. In this astute memoir, novelist Parini ( The Last Station) writes of leaving Pennsylvania in 1971 to pursue a PhD in literature at St. ![]()
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