Diego Gentini

Just a reader. The rest, pure imagination (strong, but no more than imagination).

What does Alasdair Gray mean to you?

Explain yourself?

By the very inexplicable and unlikely feeling of closeness to someone so distant in so many ways.

How does Alasdair continue to influence or inspire you?

I use this imaginary relationship as a motivation. Being in a relationship of non-reciprocated love with literature, imagining that I have Alasdair on my side helps, and a lot.

Anything else about Alasdair you’d like to add?

With an Alasdair book I feel at home, safe, corresponded. Far away in time, in space, in intellect, in life history, in personality (perhaps), in generation, in courage. But since the first encounter with just the spine of Unlikely Stories, Mostly in a bookstore in Buenos Aires in 1995 a conviction of closeness and sympathy was founded. Book after book the feeling was confirmed... Less by possibility than by imagination, I saw him on a visit to Buenos Aires as a guest of Alberto Manguel when the Argentinean became director of the National Library.

Almost thirty years after that meeting at the bookstore this rare relationship reached its climax when I came across something unimaginable at that time, something called Instagram and its account "the alasdair gray archive". Along with kind and generous responses to comments on the publications came a suggestion to present a paper at the 2022 symposium. I found myself on an adventure I never imagined. The work was done. I was able to associate two of my greatest heroes (unlikely friends) in one place, Borges and Alasdair Gray.

I can keep writing and I don't think I can come up with a total answer to explain this closeness with someone so distant.