Borges and Me
Full-length comedy-drama / 2f, 3m (doubling)
The stage adaptation of Jay Parini’s “novelistic memoir” takes us back fifty years, when Parini fled the United States for Scotland—in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of romance and his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he is tasked with driving the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges through the Highlands. As they travel 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 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.
Praise for the book by Jay Parini
“This reminiscence by Parini, who is now a prolific novelist, biographer and poet, brings Borges more sharply to life than any account I’ve read or heard . . . In this sense, the memoir is an important contribution to the biography of a major writer . . . For readers who already admire Borges, this memoir will be a delicious treat. For those who have yet to read him, Parini provides the perfect entry point to a writer who altered the way many think of literature.”
—Michael Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review
"A classic comic-philosophical road story, playfully conscious of its own traditions . . . Many of the book’s loveliest passages are pure geography; as he drives, Jay describes to Borges the passing landscapes of Scotland, to which Borges adds literary and historical context. The pressure to capture Scotland in words for the great Jorge Luis Borges forces Jay to think about language in a new way, to ‘up his game’ as a poet, and this artistic journey, occurring alongside their physical journey, becomes the book’s emotional backbone . . . A fun, tightly crafted, tenderhearted literary adventure, an improbable tale that, like many improbable tales, happens to be true."
—Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal