Andrew Graham-Yooll
Versions of Borges
Conversations: Volume 2
By Jorge Luis Borges & Osvaldo Ferrari (Translated by Tom Boll)
Seagull Books & University of Chicago Press 352pp £19.50 order from our bookshop
Thirty-three years ago, in June 1982, as the Falklands (or Malvinas) War in the South Atlantic came to a close, a visit to Jorge Luis Borges seemed in order. We had met often before. Pope John Paul II had just arrived in Buenos Aires, following his visit to the UK the previous month, but I advised The Guardian, for which I was working as a foreign correspondent, that I thought an interview with Borges was more important. The pontiff’s visit might add a topic to our talk. Borges often asked people why they came to interview him when they must have known that he had just one interview.
This second volume of chats between Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari, first published in Spanish in 1987, confirms the great man’s idea of himself. Borges had a string of topics through which he would invariably take his visitors. He might expand
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw