With Borges by Alberto Manguel, Thomas Allen, 106 pages, $19.95

This is a pamphlet disguised as a hardcover booklet, a short muse about a few years spent in the company of Jorge Luis Borges. Between 1964 to 1968, Alberto Manguel, then a 16-year-old bookstore clerk in Buenos Aires, was asked by the blind Borges to read aloud to him. This arrangement developed into a brief, but vibrant friendship.

Manguel claims that "Almost every major writer in Spanish, this century, has acknowledged a debt to Borges, from Gabriel García Marquez to Julio Cortazar, from Carlos Fuentes to Severo Sarduy ..." Described as a memoir, this book is closer to hagiography -- although Manguel does acknowledge Borges' occasional cruelty and a "senseless, commonplace racism." Otherwise there is only praise upon praise for Borges' prestigious memory, his modesty, his charming tendency to share his dreams and many other quirks of this brilliant personality. (Fans of Borges will no doubt enjoy learning about his love for West Side Story, gangster films, westerns and detective novels.)

At barely a hundred pages (including a handful of photos), With Borges does not pretend to be exhaustive; it is a mini-moir. It serves as an adjunct to the half-dozen pages Manguel spent discussing Borges in his critically acclaimed A History Of Reading, published in 1996.

In the introduction to an anthology of creative non-fiction produced at the Banff Writing Centre, Manguel recounts that the central question a journalist who writes in the first person must answer is, "Why are you telling all this to me, a stranger?" Manguel himself, however, struggles with the answer to that question in With Borges. As if to negate the value of his reflections, he writes near the end of the book, "These are not memories; they are memories of memories of memories, and the events that sparked them have vanished away, leaving only a few images, a few words, and even those I can't be certain were as I think I remember them."

If his stories about Borges are but wisps of truth, at least they're wrapped in luminous poetry. Manguel recounts how Borges would demystify great writing, "taking paragraphs apart with the amorous intensity of a clockmaker." Other passages, describing how the great writer deals with the loss of sight, are resonant: "Borges will pass his hands over the spines of the books, as if feeling his way over the rugged surface of a map in relief and, even if he does not know the territory, his skin seems to read the geography for him."

Still, the impertinent question remains, "Why I am, Alberto Manguel, asking you, a stranger, to pay 20 bucks for this slim book?" To reduce the value of the written word to a crude calculus, weighing paragraphs as if they were bulk food is no doubt crass, as some will find Manguel's insights priceless. Otherwise, the library offers the perfect opportunity to explore this text.