Your first book is by the man himself – Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths.

This is an anthology that includes a number of his famous short stories and also some key essays. If you are going to think about Latin American literature, Borges is always a good place to start. But if you are looking for the sights and sounds of Buenos Aires, where he lived all his life, you won’t find too much of that in his stories, although some of his work, especially his poems, do concentrate on that.

There is a famous essay in this book, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”. He says something along the lines of, “Why do we Argentines always have to write about local colour? Why do we have, in our literature, to be roaming around with gauchos on the pampas, or wallowing in the slums in Buenos Aires? If you look at the Quran you will notice that there are no camels in it [strictly speaking, this isn’t true]. We Argentines can emulate that – we can just write good literature that does not have to abound in local colour.”

What I like about Borges is the jewel-like precision of his short stories, and the ways in which he deals with complex metaphysical and literary questions but all within the confines of beautifully wrought, very organised stories. He really is somebody that taught a whole generation in Latin America how to write, and how to avoid endless naturalistic descriptions and to concentrate more on telling a good story. I think he does that as well as anyone I have ever read, and obviously being able to read to him was a great bonus.

What lasting image do you have of him?

I think it was his passion for literature, particularly when I looked into his luminous eyes which – even though he was completely blind – seemed to light up when he talked about literature.

Your next choice isGabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. He is an altogether different sort of writer.

Absolutely. Borges never published, for example, many more than four or five pages at a time, and his narrators tend to navigate that more abstract world of literature and ideas. Whereas what García Márquez does is tell a story of the history and culture of Latin America from the point of view of the ordinary person. He manages to do that through this deadpan narrator who can mix the savagely real with the wonderful, and narrate a family saga which is also a history of Latin America. This book really put Latin American literature on the international map because it is a novel which, while deeply Latin American, is also accessible to all readers.

GarcíaMárquez was very much of the magical realism school. For those who haven’t come across the term, can you describe what it is?

For me this is the place where the western, rational, realist mind collides with a much more oral, popular culture. What magical realism does is narrate events from a popular world view, but within a novel, which is a western rationalist form. So a young woman can ascend to heaven clutching sheets because that it how people want to remember her disappearance. García Márquez is so good at this but it is a very difficult act to follow. Many people have tried to emulate his style, not very successfully. And the term “magical realism” is often used sloppily by western critics to patronise so-called “third world” literature.