In 1964, a blind writer (and voracious reader) in his sixties approached a sixteen-year old bookstore clerk in Buenos Aires and asked if the latter would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud. The boy accepted, and did so for four years, bringing books by Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James and many others alive three or four times a week. The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the finest literary minds in any era in any country; the boy (who did not consider himself especially privileged at the time) was Alberto Manguel, who would become internationally acclaimed some time later as a prolific novelist, essayist, editor and bibliophile in his own right, intimately bound up himself with the pleasures of literature and of reading. In this slender volume, Manguel recalls those long-ago evenings when he would climb six flights of stairs to visit a darkened apartment (where the great man lived with his aged mother), which 'seemed to exist outside time'.Despite the urging of his aunt, who recognised the extraordinary opportunity to draw close to a living legend, Manguel took no notes during these sessions because he felt too 'contented': 'the conversations with Borges were what, in my mind, conversations should always be about: about books and about the clockwork of books, and about the discovery of writers I had not read before, and about ideas that had not occurred to me.
'Part memoir, part biography, and all celebration of the living quality of literature, Manguel's reflections on the works of Borges and of the writers he admired form a portrait in mosaic of this enigmatic figure, and describe an important stage in the formation of a world-class reader.
- ISBN10 0863567134
- ISBN13 9780863567131
- Publish Date 1 April 2006 (first published 20 March 2004)
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 30 March 2011
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Saqi Books
- Format Paperback
- Pages 95
- Language English