Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was a writer whose range of allusion was vast and whose reliance on sources was sometimes confessed and often an object of his critical deliberation. Few modern writers shared his breadth of erudition, which was due largely to his command of several languages, but also his recourse to well-known as well as obscure translations. The fact that he was blind for most of his life makes this all the more remarkable. The Greek and Roman classics were one of Borges's preferred fields of reference, both for the stories, characters and topics that those authors offered as well as for what they represent more generally in our conception of Western literary and philosophical history. J., a Classicist, studies both these aspects in her book with uneven success.

The book opens with a chronology, presumably for Classicists unfamiliar with Borges. While largely accurate, too much emphasis is given to his political pronouncements, which were surprising because of his being a conservative in the largely left-wing Latin American intellectual context. On the whole, Borges preferred not to be involved in politics, so mentioning those sporadic moments when he did distorts who he was and preferred to be. His conservatism was something of an embarrassment to his admirers, who made efforts, as does J. by citing the least reactionary interventions, to save him from it and from himself. Borges rejected or ignored the three major Modernist artistic and intellectual currents in the twentieth century: he disliked Marxism and its unfortunate historical applications in places like Cuba; he detested existentialism, which he considered too self-indulgent, and he disregarded psychoanalysis, which he found too centred on sex. A fourth trend that he repudiated and is relevant only in Latin American circles was the obsession with national cultural identity.

J. charts with professional competence Borges's reliance on the Classics throughout his works, and she makes occasional valuable observations about his ideas on literature in general. She is good on Borges's treatment of Homer, who becomes a character spanning centuries in Borges's work. Her consideration of Homer is the best of her analyses of the role of classical authors, and it can serve as an illustration of her most successful work. Borges was probably partly fascinated by Homer because of his blindness, but chiefly because Homer stands at the head of the canon of Western literature. In several memorable pieces Borges imagines and reconstructs Homer's life after composing his canonical poems; or how he was reconceived by later writers. He is drawn by a Homer who forgets that he is the author of the Iliad and Odyssey, and leads an ordinary life unaware of his stature as a great figure. This is a ploy that Borges often applies to himself, memorably in ‘Borges and I’, where he contrasts the famous writer he had become with the ordinary man who likes coffee and to hear the strum of a guitar. Borges believed in the primacy of literary tradition, which is a far more determinant factor for him than the authors who created the masterpieces that make it up, and none more apt of playing the role of inconsequentiality than Homer. J. does a very good job of plotting Homer, as she does with other classical authors like Heraclitus and Virgil. But the conclusions she draws about what this implies about Borges's conception of literature are not very original.

J.’s background on modern philosophy, criticism and theory is deficient. She lumps together ‘(post) modern thinkers such as Gérard Genette, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom’ (p. 2), a miscellaneous and wrongly labelled trio. Later she refers to ‘the premises of (new) historicism, which despite its many revisions, continues to stress the importance of interpreting texts according to the contexts in which they are produced’ (p. 6), which is vague and misleading. Worse yet, elsewhere she writes: ‘These movements blended aspects of nineteenth-century Existentialism and late nineteenth-century Symbolism’ (p. 18). But existentialism was very much a twentieth-century philosophical movement, which ‘began’ with Heidegger's Being and Time, published in 1927, and peaked in the 1940s and 1950s in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.

J.’s grasp of Latin American literature and culture shows that this is not her field. She refers to Latin American literature as ‘South American’ (p. 72), a common error made by the uninformed; Mexico is in North America, and the Caribbean is hardly southern. Her command of Borges's publication record lacks the precision of a specialist. She writes that ‘“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote”, was published in Fictions [sic] in 1944’ (p. 6); but while it was collected in that book (whose title Ficciones was never translated into English), the story first appeared in the journal Sur in 1939 (año 9, no. 56). A difference of five years at the peak of Borges's creative career is not insignificant. J. (p. 103) does not realise that to a Spanish speaker hacedor sounds like an odd neologism. Borges uses hacedor to signify ‘maker’, ‘fabricator’, ‘constructor’, thus withdrawing from authorship the idea of inspiration. She does not seem to be aware of an Argentine line of writers who were devoted to the Classics. For instance, Bartolomé Mitre translated Horace, and Leopoldo Lugones translated Homer. Significantly, Borges knew the Classics mostly through English, not Spanish, translations and rewritings. She should have taken into account English as a mediator between the Classics and Borges. He knew no Greek, and I wonder if his Latin was as strong as J. takes it to be.

The volume is poorly written; it is full of awkward and repeated, self-reflexive transitions saying what the author has done and is intending to do that hector the reader, but not by the force of arguments. There are also numerous clichés – ‘destabilizing’, ‘subvert’, ‘undermines’ – and so forth. On pages 26 to 27 ‘complex’, a weak word anyway, repeated throughout the book, appears four times. Then there is ‘dialogue’, as ‘in dialogue with Homer’ (p. 27), another bland platitude that is useless unless one learns what each interlocutor is saying. ‘Constellation’ is frequently used too, lumping together without explanation things which may or may not be compatible. Hyperboles about the novelty of what Borges did with the Classics and what this book purports to show abound.

J. tends to attribute to Borges what the narrators of his stories say, but these characters are often problematic figures of their own, whose stances must be taken into account in interpreting the texts; they cannot be taken at face value, as accurately reflecting what the author believes. Bold critical propositions, such as false attributions (The Imitation of Christ to Luis Ferdinand Celine), or altered chronologies (the Aeneid preceding The Odyssey) are suggestive, but Borges himself never practised such in his own work.

J. follows current trends concerning the postcolonial, which lead her astray in her approach to Borges. She speaks of ‘the cultural developments of postcolonial Argentina’ (p. 15), for instance. Postmodern and postcolonial applied to Argentina and to Borges, who abhorred chronological categories of this kind, seems like pledging allegiance to what Harold Bloom once called ‘the school of resentment’. Postcolonial and postmodern are concepts that are rooted in a kind of historicity that is not at all Borgesian. She needs contrasts to think: centre vs periphery, Western vs marginal. In her approach, Argentina is either not part of the West or only peripheral to it. All this goes against what Borges argues in ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, a 1951 lecture that J. misreads, in which he debunks the whole cultural identity thrust of much of Latin American thinking. There is political correctness behind all this. J. cannot envisage Borges on his own or within literature, but only in contrast to a mainstream Western literature to which he does not presumably belong, or only marginally. In his lecture, Borges had anticipated the ‘pathetic formulations’ that the cultural identity issue could generate. Argentina a ‘peripheral nation’ (p. 84)? Stand on busy, traffic-choked Corrientes Avenue in modern Buenos Aires and try to think seriously of Argentina as non-Western.