Borges in Love: The Argentinian author's loves and heartbreaks, narrated by Patricio Zunini

"It was long, childish, labyrinthine, banal: unbeatable." That's what Patricio Zunini says, at the end of the conversation, about his answers. It has many layers of meaning. The first, and obvious one, is a joke that emulates the adjectives Jorge Luis Borges wrote down to qualify poems in a 1963 competition. The second, although it doesn't quite capture the point, has a golden thread that links it to the great Argentine writer .

And there we must carefully unearth the gem that makes the joke. He is the author of not one, but two books on the author of The Aleph . A third is that, for one reason or another, he has been imbued with a certain Borgesian air. Not the most obvious, but another: the funny, neurotic, efficient, enlightened, methodical.

Zunini can be defined by those virtues. That's how he works. Like when he was editor of the Eterna Cadencia blog between 2009 and 2016 , or director of the Filba Foundation from 2010 to 2014 , or product manager of the readers' social network Grandes Libros, or a curious and exhaustive interviewer of more than a hundred literary figures, or a chronicler of cultural and educational topics in national and international media, or now, also, in his brand-new role on the Board of the National Fund for the Arts (FNA) , where he is the new representative of the Literature discipline, an honorary position he will hold for four years.

He also puts these skills into play when he writes several books. These include Fogwill. A Choral Memory (Mansalva, 2014), a compilation and curation of interviews with friends, writers, editors, and various cultural figures, including Alberto Laiseca, César Aira, and María Moreno, who were associated with the author of Los Pichiciegos ; What is a Writer? 100 Questions about Argentine Literature (Pánico el Pánico, 2018), which compiles responses from intellectuals and writers such as Ricardo Piglia, Beatriz Sarlo, Martín Kohan, and Alberto Manguel; Román (IndieLibros, 2020), a chronicle of Riquelme's various stages; and Borges in the Library (Galerna, 2023), an exploration of his time at the Miguel Cané and National Universities.

The small hypothesis, now, is that Borges left a little mark on him . One piece of evidence is hard to confirm: Zunini says his mother always saw him drinking coffee at Galería del Este , then greeted him with the feeling of a friendly neighbor, and always assured him that he, at nine years old, was also part of the ritual. He can't vouch for it, he says, but he likes the story.

More empirically, he had to continue delving into the author's figure after the first book. And he chose love as the theme for the second. So a few days ago, at the Casa Victoria Ocampo in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo Chico, he presented his latest obsession.

Borges in Love is a memoir as packed with information as it is original in its excerpts . The back cover is written by Guillermo Saccomanno, who says, among other things: "If Patricio Zunini's research has any purpose, it is to illuminate a side of Borges intimately connected to his writing. With rigor and obsession, he delves into a little-known area of ​​Borges and adds value to his vast bibliography."

In six chapters and 180 pages, the book explores all these links , between the chaste and the passionate, from Concepción Guerrero to María Kodama, passing through Estela Canto and more.

The presentation was a packed house . There were friends, family, colleagues, and an interested audience. “Two very dear people,” as Zunini defined them, chatted with the author and shared their impressions of Borges in Love . “It has many anecdotes, but it's not just a documentary. It poses a hypothesis about love . The title itself is a challenge: to think of Borges not as a reader, teacher, or writer, but as one gripped by that passion,” began psychoanalyst Luciano Luterau . Afterward, critic and columnist Flavia Pittella said that the book “takes Borges out of the marble and shows him as a human being.”

To close the meeting, Pitella invited Zunini to play a ping-pong game, where the answer had to be limited to a single word. Zunini politely tried to follow the rules, but ended up exceeding the restriction with humor. Earlier, for the photos in this report, he had joked that he was coming from the hairdresser's.

In the final toast, among other humorous comments, he said, "I never stopped being that hippie kid," and pointed to the sneakers that contrasted with his tie, which he put on, but felt very formal. "It's not my idea, but it's confirmed by the number of publications on the subject: Borges's literature has many entry points. That's something that interests me a lot about him," he later commented, now in the interview role.

–What appeals to you about the figure of Borges, which you have already addressed twice?

–Both Borges in the Library and Borges in Love are two of my own proposals, in which I address topics rarely explored in his life. He was director of the National Library for 18 years, and there were some articles and essays, but not a book about it. And we know that Borges had a tragic love life, and there have been books, even a masterful novel by Aníbal Jarkowski, but I thought compiling them into a single plot could give another layer to the Borgesian figure.

–Borges, but also Riquelme and Fogwill. You've returned to biographical work. What interests you about the genre?

–With regard to biographies, it's a genre I love. There's a book by Michael Holroyd, How to Write a Life , in which he says this, which I find fascinating: giving order and meaning to chaos. I think it's the greatest task a narrator can undertake. I appreciate you classifying my books in that genre, but I don't know if they're strictly biographies. With Fogwill, what I thought was a collective memory. And with Borges, I took two specific themes, which are his years in libraries, and now his tragic loves. In that sense, it seems to me there are other more complete biographies. At this point, I've realized that I'm no longer pursuing universality. I'm trying to write brick by brick.

–How do you choose the figures you write about?

–They're people who call me to tell a story. Fogwill is a story in himself, as vast as Borges. We talked about him all the time, and I loved writing that book, in which I was able to weave together those voices and anecdotes. Riquelme, of course, called for a sporting pulse. Football is storytelling. It was born with the radio. Or with El Gráfico. Football isn't about TV, it's about connections. Telling that unique story was exciting. And about Borges, I think everyone who reads and writes at some point wants to tell what happened to them with Borges. With his books, with that figure, with some interview they've read, some anecdote that connects them. Borges is a powerhouse of stories, and I think we all want to do that at some point.

–Are you going to continue telling Borges, then?

–Yes. I wrote these two books about Borges for Galerna, and I want to share one more: Kodama's biography, which I think is like "Borges in the Afterlife," which tells us a bit like this. My hypothesis is that Borges remains so important today, of course for having been Borges, but above all for the way she dedicated herself to caring for his work. And I want to see if that holds up.

–Are there other figures worth writing about on your horizon?

–Regarding upcoming biography books, I have a project about Daniel Divinsky. We conducted several interviews because we were thinking about writing his memoir, with a dialogue structure. But now, with his death, that has to change, so I'm thinking about how it continues, what new form it will take.

Borges in Love, by Patricio Zunini (Galerna).