Travel Blog

Had a beer last night at Brew with Javier, the most literate waiter in Fort Lauderdale. He was inside writing on his laptop - he's working on a novel - until I convinced him to sit outside.

I asked him who he thought would win the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. "Roth should win it," he said. "He's the best writer alive. It's too bad they can't give it posthumously," he added. "Then Bolano could get it." "He's done very well in death," I said. "The New York Times loves him," said Javier.

He told me about the Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was a friend of Borges and, according to Javier, a better writer. The two used to meet a couple times a week and talk books, writing, writers, often in belittling terms. "They were like two old ladies," Javier said. They talked about how American writers made such a big deal of drinking, and doubted that they could do the same with their chief indulgence: croissants with cafe con leche. Borges once expressed admiration for a novelist's titles, then dismay that he felt compelled to write books to go with them. Borges thought Hemingway was an abysmal writer. Apparently, Bioy Casares kept a diary, consisting of thousands of pages, and many of these conversations are in it. "He was like Boswell was to Johnson," Javier said.

A train rumbled past, nearly shaking our table, then uncharacteristically came to a stop, blocking traffic on the river and SW 2nd Street. It looked romantic in the dark, framed by the trunks of sidewalk palms. I mentioned a great American diarist: Edmund Wilson. He was as unknown to Javier as Bioy Casares was to me. I didn't mention that, for all his wide-ranging curiosity, Wilson had no interest in books written in Spanish. (Though Javier would probably have been more amused than insulted.)

When I got up to leave at ten, the train still sat on its tracks, effectively dividing downtown. Had this been a Borges story, it would have been filled with books.