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This volume offers a unique view of Borges origins: her mother´s memoirs. This is not merely the view of a parent - Besides constantly encouraging Borges´ writing, she actively participated in his creative endeavors: her visual memory provided Borges with both inspiration and detailed settings for several of his stories set in old-time Buenos Aires. “My mother,” Borges once remarked, “was my closest collaborator.”

This book thus offers a unique perspective on Borges´origins and growth that complements every existing biography - and will provide material for a new ones. BUt they also constitute a narration about the city´s past.

Borges´ mother memories had only survived in a short autbiographical attempt from the 1950s, and several hundred annotations by Alicia Jurado. Through painstaking research that took him more than a decade, Martín Hadis succeeded in gathering and weaving those materials together into a coherent whole. The result is this memoir that spans almost a century— the memories of a life that began in a bygone age of courtyard wells and came to its end at the dawn of our technological era.

In these pages, Borges´ mother provides previously unknown details about his son´s childhood and earliest intellectual upbringing. She also sheds light on the origins of many of Borges´ lifelong passions—tigers, mirrors, and etymologies—and shows that the wry humor that characterized him was already present in his earliest years. She then intertwines her unique perspective on Argentina’s social and cultural life with the progress and publications of Borges’s career.

These Memoirs make for a fascinating read because they offer, both a historical perspective and a fresh, unexpected view of the life and works of Jorge Luis Borges.