Martín Kohan manages to get Borges to sign a copy of El Aleph. He does not yet know that this gesture—minimal, secret, almost comical—will also be the starting point for a greater story. Borges was not just a writer; he was a collective invention. Kohan delves into the territory where literature becomes myth and myth becomes politics. He traces the gestures, phrases, and superstitions that turned Borges into a national hero, a secular saint, a mirror of the Argentine people. Among venerated manuscripts, apocryphal signatures, and fake verses, Lo que entiendo por Borges explores how a literary cult is constructed and what that devotion says about us. More than a book about Borges, it is a book about the Argentina that needed to invent him.

«When I say Borges, I don’t mean Borges: that man of flesh and blood born in 1899 and who died in 1986… When I say Borges, I think of that figure that the Argentine imagination has composed and fixed in that name. I think of that mental and collective configuration that has been constructed without the need to know the real person, and often without even knowing his work».