We should all be lucky enough to be loved by someone -- as much as that old, blind Argentinian loved English literature. I feel pretty darn jealous of Borges's students at the University of Buenos Aires (while also feeling a little bit of pity for them, too), because he was clearly a wonderful, enthusiastic, funny, and frustrating professor.

It sure doesn't resemble any literature survey I've sat through, and that's probably for the best. Borges gleefully chucks canon to curb and walks his class through a very idiosyncratic collection of writers. I had never even heard of Dante Rossetti before, but I painfully wish I was in the classroom that day while Borges rattled off Rossetti's sad life from memory and then sang him praises. Full of bias and affection for these writers, you feel like every obscure line of poetry that Borges recites must be the most important line in history.

Admittedly, Borges can be a little...circuitous. He's the living embodiment of the phrase "He's forgotten more than I'll ever know." Consequently, he'll rattle off fact after fact (most of them even true!), and it can be hard to see how it all connects. He interrupts his discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to explain the plot of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and I still haven't the foggiest what on earth was the point of all that. But, it's hard to be mad at Borges, as he chuckles at his own digressions and mistakes, and carefully shepherds his students on to the next fascinating class.


(Small note: the translation is mostly brilliant and flawlessly captures Borges's voice. But the translator keeps using the word 'pathetic' in the sense of compassion or sympathy, and that is really jarring given its negative connotation. It took me a while to realize Borges wasn't ragging on every book each time he called it pathetic)