The first thing a young Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) learned in his conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was to value writing that was deliberate, restrained, and clear. Bioy dates this revelation to sometime between 1931 and 1946, before he began the diary that would chronicle their friendship, a record that starts in May 1947 and ends in 1989, three years after Borges’ death. Long considered a cult object among Spanish-speaking readers, Borges — the title of this 700-page diary — is set to be released in English for the first time in October 2026 by NYRB Classics, in a translation by Valerie Miles. That first decisive conversation of Bioy and Borges possibly happened while they were walking in the countryside, perhaps even on the Bioy family’s estancia in Pardo, about 133 miles from the city of Buenos Aires, where they raised and sold cattle, and where the writer would spend long stretches of the summer.
Adolfo Bioy Sr. was a wealthy rancher with large estates in the rural province of Buenos Aires, and he supported his son’s literary ambitions. The younger Bioy, at the time the near-secret author of a single book, breathed in the modernist spirit of contemporary European literature. When Borges asked him what he liked, Bioy answered that he preferred experimentation in art. He added that there was a place for madness in literary creation, and that the proper way to approach writing was through thoughtlessness. Borges, 15 years his senior, surprised him that afternoon. He was not an advocate of the new or the free, as many ambitious young Argentine writers were. On the contrary, Borges reminded him of his teachers and the old guard: he praised a literature that could be of a previous century, one that was measured, temperate, and reflective.
But by that very night, Bioy had already been converted, turned away from the creed of absolute newness and total freedom. The next day, he began the long run of a literary career shaped by more direct and less vague writing, guided by thought and restraint, which would last 60 years and establish him as perhaps the most respected Argentine writer after his friend.
Was that the right lesson to take from Borges? Or, put differently, could a reader of him truly learn to reject literary modernity through his work? It doesn’t seem so. Borges, though perhaps more moderate and precise in his prose, is no less daring, experimental, or profound than Joyce or Kafka. One could even argue that, in his explorations of metatextual and self-conscious writing, he produced some better pages than the Irishman. And I wouldn’t hesitate to say that his philosophical density rivals that of his Bohemian predecessor.
The right answer, as always with Borges, lies somewhere between the extremes: not total constraint, but never a free flow of ideas. In an entry recorded by Bioy about 15 years into the diary, Borges tells him that the philosopher Schopenhauer had said there were three kinds of writers: those who don’t think when they write, the worst kind; those who think while they write; and those who think before writing, which Schopenhauer considered to be the best. Borges isn’t so sure. Maybe that method works for philosophical essays or treatises, he says, but in literature it is good that the author discovers what he wants to say while he’s saying it. Otherwise, the writing feels contrived and unappealing. The reader, he insists, must sense, at least to some extent, that the writer is living the story along with them.
When asked about his method for creating fiction, Borges once answered that the part that came to him — “was given to him,” as he put it — was the beginning and the end of the story. What he needed to discover — or, more precisely, to create, to write (or dictate, in his later blind years) — was everything in between. And while Borges, like any author, probably had some elevator-pitch version of his poetic craft that didn’t always hold up in practice, Borges is a powerful testimony to how close his mind really worked to that method. In his conversations with Bioy, he often sketches out story after story, enjoying the talk but setting them aside because he knows those sketches aren’t literature. They still require the discovery that comes only through the slow, arduous work of language, plot, characters, and the world that emerges around them. The things that happen while you are writing.
And one of the most comforting things to learn about the greatest Argentine writer, through this diary, is that mostly, like many of us, he didn’t really enjoy that part. The important part. The writing. It bored him, it annoyed him, and he was always on the brink of avoiding it. At one point, he doesn’t understand why Eduardo Mallea, a literary peer and the director of the cultural section of the prestigious journal La Nación, wants to rewrite a generic declaration that their mutual friends had asked them to sign just to make it more personal. Borges, somewhat exasperated, jokingly suggests that perhaps the ideal arrangement would be one in which writers could simply come up with the ideas and leave the actual writing to someone else.
Bioy hardly narrates in these pages. He tells us that he and Borges walk in the countryside. One day, in the city, where they are almost always found, they drive out to look at the site of a protest. Another time, they stroll through the streets and end up sitting in a public square. For years, they have dinner together several times a week. Silvina Ocampo, Bioy’s wife and the third member of what was arguably Argentina’s most talented literary trio, even complains about Borges’ constant presence in the house — but the friends keep going. They also attend meetings at La Nación, or with editors, but these are dispatched in two or three lines.
What they mostly do, through these pages, is talk, and almost always in Bioy’s house. This feels like the perfect key to the kind of writers they were.
Bioy reconstructs these conversations with a striking commitment to literality. It’s hard to imagine the pains he takes with them. He does not tape Borges, and his friend doesn’t even know he is keeping the diary, although at certain points over the years, he hints that he suspects the project exists. Like Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, Bioy writes the dialogues like a classical play. He puts BORGES (in all caps) and lets the man speak, without any description of action. When he responds, he writes BIOY. One pictures them at a table. And later, offscreen, Bioy sitting at his desk each night, after Borges has left, or the next day transcribing the dinner conversation as faithfully as he can. PEYROU and WILCOCK appear frequently, two among the very few writers they respect. Of course, SILVINA is present at many of these chats. And other characters show up once or twice as speaking voices. Each says their piece in direct speech, and nearly everything unfolds in the present tense.
More than a memoir or a biography, this diary can be seen as the ultimate expression of a very particular kind of chronicle: the collected greatest hits of a man who excelled at informal conversation.
The text is, of course, Bioy’s ultimately, and must have involved a good deal of rewriting or reinterpretation on his part. Could anyone really remember whole paragraphs of Borges speaking about Goethe at a lecture, digressing about Wordsworth’s poetic accomplishments over dinner, or delivering a speech with political overtones at the National Library, with exactitude? And yet Borges, in these pages, is one of the most uncannily real characters you can find. No one could have invented him. You feel, unmistakably, that not even Bioy, nor any other writer, could have come up with the things Borges says: they could only have happened in reality. Borges, the book, stands as a paradoxical investigation of the mundane vitality of conversation, of the strange singularities that emerge there, carried out by two writers devoted to inventive, imaginative literature who mostly dismissed gritty realism.
“Many times, Borges’ words grant people more reality than life itself,” Bioy writes, recalling from a distance the experience of speaking with the man across a lifetime. And all the way, we feel the depth of Borges’ influence on Bioy’s way of seeing the world, but that influence rolls over us, too. We sense, along with the author, how everything can be touched and transformed by Borges’ mind.
But what is this reality that Bioy captures in his record of conversations? What is this thing that feels more real than life? Is it literature?
This question is more complicated than it seems. Yes, it is probably literature that these two friends find more revealing than reality itself, but what kind of literature is that? The book offers no single answer, and it would go against Borges’ deep aversion to academic systems and literary movements to try to pin one down. Still, I find something that endures across the years, a quiet constant in how these two writers seem to understand the craft of writing.
It is, in a sense, simple, and certainly at odds with the spirit of their time: those postwar decades filled with manifestos, grandiose claims, and urgent aesthetic theories. What we see in Borges and Bioy’s literary conversations is something different: a shared effort to apply sensitivity and rational observation to the small structures of human interaction, to the way things and people are put together in the social world. Grandiosity, exaggerated rupture, and theoretical complexity, they seem to believe, leave the writer spinning in place, disconnected from reality. Literature, instead, should make people and things more present and more charged with meaning in our lives, even if it speaks of invented worlds hidden in obscure encyclopedias or of an immortal man deciphering his destiny.
The Argentine novelist and essayist Alan Pauls, in an important book on Borges’ work, pointed out this aspect of his literature a few years before the diary was published. Borges, Pauls wrote, underwent a transformation just before meeting Bioy. In his 20s, he had been a partisan of innovative metaphors and self-consciously baroque style, but by the early 1930s, he had come to believe that good writing could be found in the non-literary moments of life: a phrase uttered in the middle of a hand of truco; the distinctive intonation of a woman explaining to the maid how to set the table; the way friends say hello when they meet before sitting down.
Reality, singularly, has as much to teach about literature as literature itself. And this from a man who made his first translation from English (Wilde’s The Happy Prince) at the age of 7 and, in Harold Bloom’s words, probably lived the most literary life of all. There’s a kind of wisdom, Borges sensed, in how people speak naturally, a wisdom that tends to disappear when they try to write in a “literary” way.
In 1954, Borges tells Bioy about a writer who overheard her friend talking on the phone about something personal. The writer refers to Borges: “Emita spoke unstoppably, and the poor thing [el pobre] didn’t even make a peep.” Borges draws attention to the magnificent use of the expression el pobre (masculine in Spanish), which, all by itself, and very economically, shows that the person on the other end was a man, maybe a boyfriend. He notes that if the same woman telling the story had been writing instead of speaking, she probably wouldn’t have used it. She would have found it obscure, not sufficiently explicit, and would have added more literary words to compensate.
Borges and Bioy’s mutual conversation is the only school that seems to matter to them. They pay no real attention to any movement or event beyond what each one brings to their shared table. And although Bioy — who recognized his friend’s exceptional talent early on, when Borges was not even a local celebrity, much less the universal writer he would later become — is undoubtedly the one who benefits most from the exchange, it is Borges who always seems the more present of the two, the more animated, the one more inclined to extend the conversation and go into detail on any topic they happen to touch.
Borges creates with Bioy a complicity that turns out to be more important for a great mind than any intellectual community of contemporaries, the kind that, as T. S. Eliot thought, ought to support and defend the first steps of a writer. In that second circle were the contributors and editors of the revolutionary magazine Sur; Victoria Ocampo, its director as well as Bioy’s sister-in-law and Borges’ promoter in Argentina and, crucially, abroad; Emecé Press, which nurtured its two prodigies with dedication; La Nación, where they were regularly published; and the SADE (Argentine Society of Writers), an institution they often belittled even as it granted them a not insignificant social standing, among others.
Notwithstanding all that, Borges’ genius seemed to require something else to flourish: the freedom of intimate conversation. And Bioy’s complicity was there precisely for that.
It is in that intimacy that they can speak freely, among other things, about what they truly think of the second circle that fosters and celebrates them. And because what they truly think is often unflattering, the book has always been, and was from the moment it appeared, something of a challenge for many Argentines.
What some readers fail to understand is that complicit conversation is the only way to decipher and dismantle the last enemy of good writing: foolishness. In an entry from 1956, Borges praises some verses by their friend Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, who had unjustly lost a national poetry contest. Borges recites approvingly a stanza in which the speaker, a man betrayed by his wife, imagines the lovers in his own house. The man pictures them celebrating “their erotic contract” next to his books, next to his portrait, and closes by saying: “perhaps naked, and perhaps loquacious.”
A fool could not have composed these verses, Borges says. First, a fool would have dismissed “contract” as too commercial a word, not poetic enough. But more importantly, he asks: How would a fool have written the last line? Would he have said, “perhaps naked, and perhaps clothed”?
The observation is essential. The clumsy, automatic instinct to complete literary phrases by simply balancing opposing elements would have deprived us of the precise genius of “loquacious” as the final word. For Borges, not only abstract pomposity and wild expressiveness but also foolishness — maybe the three are the same thing — condemns a writer to a vague, ill-defined world, one in which it becomes impossible to find subtleties like the pain of imagining one’s wife not just naked, but speaking animatedly with another man.
And to combat foolishness, you have to point to it and reflect freely on its effects. To define it, you have to speak about foolish people, whoever they are, and most certainly you will find them among people close to you, because you can observe them better. Bioy’s record simply brings to the surface something we should already know: that only through cold, clinical observations of other people, or of their sensible and intellectual capacities, can you learn to battle literature’s many foes. And sometimes, the laughter these observations provoke is what seals that learning for good.
I have these kinds of exchanges myself with my father, who is a poet, or with one or two writer friends with whom I share a certain complicit intimacy. Are we hypocritical or cruel with our close ones? I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t care about them, or that I don’t sometimes feel badly about what I think — I do care — but I know that I am doing something else: I am trying to write at my best. It is hard for me to understand that most writers don’t do the same, but the point of contention would still be: Why make those private sessions public?
When Borges was published in 2006, Bioy had been dead for seven years, and Borges for 20. Like many of his other personal writings, the book was published thanks to the extraordinarily careful and erudite work of Daniel Martino, its literary editor. The story Martino tells is that when he and Bioy met, in the late ’80s and ’90s, and developed a close friendship, Bioy confided that he didn’t want to die without writing the book about Borges he had always dreamed of writing.
Bioy had kept a diary for most of his life — more than 17,000 handwritten pages recording all his vital and literary vicissitudes — and when Martino saw how many entries involved conversations with his genius friend, he said: You already have the book here.
They worked together on it. The project, it seems, revitalized Bioy, who having lost his wife in 1993, and a year later their only daughter, Marta, in a car accident, was suddenly able to spend six hours a day thoroughly correcting the entries with his much younger contributor. Martino adds that the writer’s death in 1999 took them by surprise. Supposedly, the idea had not been to publish the book posthumously, but the scandal caused by its release among Argentina’s intellectual and media circles now makes it difficult to imagine that any other outcome had ever been possible.
Unlike many writers at the time, my father was an early adopter of Bioy’s Borges. He started reading it days after it came out and relished how the duo, in his opinion, put things in their place and spoke bluntly about Argentina’s median literary mediocrity rather than sustaining the illusion of an unparalleled 20th-century tradition.
I, who was 18 at the time, had just published a “secret” poetry book of my own and still needed to attempt intelligible, reasoned writing, the kind Bioy himself only began to pursue after meeting Borges. I couldn’t help but feel offended by what my father told me about how these two men spoke of the obscure, introspective lyricism I then valued.
So when I read the confusing review signed by Alan Pauls, otherwise a sharp and deep reader of Borges, I found it comforting. The novelist, overtaken by the displeasure provoked by Borges and Bioy ridiculing, by name, the sayings and writings of people who were surely part of their own circles — many of them, perhaps, even Pauls’ own mentors — seemed unable to value what those moments of clinical analysis truly conveyed. More strangely still, I realize now, he didn’t seem to notice how the conversations confirmed his own theory about Borges: that the author sought literature not in grand gestures, but in the understated texture of ordinary speech. Instead, Pauls concluded that Borges was a mandarin of hypocrisy, and that the pair represented something close to a special kind of intellectual sociopath.
Quite a few Argentines still feel alienated by the book. I can understand some of those reactions. In it, Borges and Bioy appear to dismiss, even mock, the entire literary scene of Buenos Aires. Important and respected academics and men of letters, like José Bianco or Enrique Pezzoni, are treated by the two friends as inept fools or even brutes, simply because one failed to grasp an argument they made or the other defended an aesthetic position they found unconvincing or too fashionable.
It’s true that even if you have no personal stake in the old feuds and are rooting for Borges and Bioy, you may still find yourself wondering what these two jerks would say about a poor soul like yourself after you had left the room, since they could think those things about people of such stature.
But that’s not the invitation the book makes. While I understand some of the reactions to it, mostly from people portrayed poorly in the intimacy of the two admired writers, my empathy stops there. It stops at the point where you truly engage with the reading and allow yourself to go through what the book actually proposes.
Something similar to what happened to Bioy with Borges, and to Borges before meeting Bioy, happened to me while reading them both. I came to see something simple but quite difficult to learn: that to write good literature, the best place to start is by asking what you are actually communicating in the phrase you are writing, setting aside any theory, manifesto, or aesthetic movement that supposedly carries the meaning.
The meaning is in the phrase.
By the 2000s, something had shifted in Argentine literary readership, something probably more important for the reception of the book than any actual evaluation of its moral conundrums. For decades, the national intellectual class no longer belonged to the upper tiers of society, as the Bioys and the Ocampos undoubtedly had, and Borges perhaps to a lesser extent.
By then, the literary and academic world was largely populated by the middle class — people who studied in the public classrooms of the University of Buenos Aires and were steeped in structuralist thought and postmodern literary criticism, two traditions Borges and Bioy neither engaged with nor cared for.
Even the way Bioy uses the book’s most repeated phrase, Come en casa Borges (“Borges eats at home”), sounded alien to middle-class ears, who would more naturally say, in Spanish, cenar (“to dine”), as poet and Borges expert Santiago Llach has pointed out.
The negative reaction is best understood in this light, I think: Once again, the aristocratic pair, even in death, had managed to taunt Argentine culture, belittle its sophisticated institutions, and renounce any need for approval from its luminaries. And all that just for writing their good phrases? Perhaps. And, for Argentines, there is probably nothing less patriotic than Borges and Bioy’s egotism but, at the same time, there is little more Argentine than the feeling that you are more important than anything around you. The real answer to why these private conversations became a book lies somewhere inside this paradox.
Manuel M. Novillo is a writer and academic based in Tucumán, Argentina. A Fulbright alum (NYU, MA in Politics), he has published three books of poetry, is completing his first novel, and runs the Spanish-language Substack Curva de aprendizaje.
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Very excited to read this when the English language translation comes out!
Bravo!!! Fantastic essay, on a fascinating book. Thank you.