GatesyRead

  I picked this book up at Schiphol Airport on a wayward flight that took me from Hamburg to Lyon via Amsterdam. I had just finished reading Martin Amis’   The Zone of Interest   and I was promised something lighter: the road trip of a young man (Jay Parini) and an ancient writer (Jorge Luis Borges). The setting is the Scottish highlands, though first we meet a mature J. Parini, now a successful writer living in Vermont (1986). Memories of his life-changing time studying at St Andrews in Scotland surface when Parini hears of the great author’s death. He casually mentions his youthful journals, which presumably lie behind the details and anecdotes in the account. The blurb at the back describes Borges and Me as a “classic road novel, based on true events”. Most of it rings true; though the brief affair with the Nordic Ailith on the remote Orkney Islands reads like wishful thinking. The story proper begins in 1970. New Yorker Parini has escaped the draft by relocating to St Andrews in