Borges and Me premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, turning Jay Parini’s 2020 memoir about a 1971 road trip around Scotland with Jorge Luis Borges into a polished cultural event. The film was shot entirely in Scotland and uses a local cast and crew, a tidy reminder that even a story about books, memory and movement still gets packaged through institutions, premieres and the usual gatekeepers.
A road trip, then and now
Parini was a student at the University of St Andrews in 1971 when he escorted Borges on the trip. Borges, who lived from 1899 to 1986, was a short-story writer, essayist and poet, and is considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. Educated in Europe, he became a professor in Buenos Aires and in 1955 was appointed director of the country’s national library. Books and libraries recur throughout his fiction, and on the 1971 trip he wanted to visit the historic Carnegie Library in Dunfermline.
That visit produced the article’s sharpest scene of authority, though not the kind usually celebrated by cultural festivals. Parini said he would never forget what happened there. “We walked into the Carnegie Library and Borges said 'I can't see, show me some books',” he said. “I brought him the Encyclopaedia Britannica and he asked 'what year?' I said 'I think it's 1911'. He said: 'Oh, the best year for that Encyclopaedia. Give it to me!' And he takes it and starts licking the book and the little old librarian says 'you must not lick the book, sir. You must not lick the books'.”
A blind writer, a librarian, a book, a rule. Small scene, old hierarchy. The authority in the room belonged to the institution, even if the moment belongs to Borges.
Scotland, memory and the festival machine
Parini, born in Pennsylvania in 1948, is a poet, professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont and the author of eight novels. He came to St Andrews in 1970, and his seven years there helped him avoid the Vietnam War, where one of his oldest friends died. He said his time in Scotland introduced him to George Mackay Brown, Alastair Reid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Hugh MacDiarmid.
Reid, the Scots poet, translator and writer played by Alan Cumming in the film, first introduced Parini to Borges and set the road trip in motion. Borges was close friends with Reid, who translated the Argentinian’s work. Borges had been meant to stay with Reid at his cottage, but when Reid was called away on a family emergency, Parini was brought in to babysit the blind author.
Borges invited himself on Parini’s planned trip to Orkney to meet poet Mackay Brown. On the way, they stopped at Lower Largo, Culloden, Loch Ness and Dunfermline. Borges imagined himself as Don Quixote, crossing the Highlands with Parini as his squire and companion Sancho Panza. He nicknamed Parini’s borrowed Morris Traveller Rocinante, after the horse from Miguel De Cervantes’ 17th century novel. The car used in the film was later bought as a souvenir by Alan Cumming.
Director Marc Turtletaub had previously attended the Edinburgh International Film Festival with his film Puzzle, which starred Kelly Macdonald as a housewife who becomes a professional jigsaw puzzle solver. He said he had no doubt Borges and Me had to premiere there. He said, “We had a whole cast of wonderful Scottish actors. I'd always wanted to work with Alan Cumming, Peter Mullan and John Gordon Sinclair - since Gregory's Girl,” and added, “Morven Christie, Freya Mavor, this wonderful cast and an all-Scottish crew. It's truly a Scottish movie.”
The festival, the cast, the crew, the premiere. Culture gets its own machinery, complete with branding and local pride, while the harder questions about who gets to move, who gets to stay, and who gets to define the public good remain elsewhere.
Who gets to make art
Parini said returning to his alma mater of St Andrews, transformed to look like it did in the 1970s, was strange. “It's amazing how memory is supplanted by reality and pretty quickly the actors took the place of reality,” he said. “Peter Mullan doesn't look that much like George Mackay Brown but he absolutely embodies him. And suddenly I do see Borges as Luis Gnecco and I almost see myself as Fionn Whitehead, although he's a lot nicer looking than I am.”
Turtletaub and Parini said the film is more than an entertaining Scottish road movie. Parini said, “I think that that week with Borges was the foundation of all of my writing because Borges said to me 'you will be my eyes' and he kept urging me to see, to look closely.” Turtletaub said, “It's a two-handed road movie of an older man and a younger man coming of age. But there is a second layer which is about how to become an artist.” He added, “As someone who came to directing and producing later in life, it was really fascinating to see how slowly this young gentleman, fifty years ago, began to discover his own voice. And now Jay has written close to 40 books, it really shows the process by which creativity began to flourish.”
Turtletaub and Parini said they hope the film will remind people of the importance of world literature and Scotland’s place in it. Turtletaub said that during filming in Glasgow, people repeatedly knew Borges, Alistair Reid and George Mackay Brown. “We're in the right place to show this film,” he said.
So the premiere arrives with all the usual cultural confidence: a famous writer, a celebrated memory, a national setting, a festival stage. The machinery hums. The books stay put.