‘The Invention of Morel’ in ‘Death+Taxes’

There is perhaps no other work of fantastic, surreal fiction that has had such a great influence, yet remains so absurdly unknown as Adolfo Bioy Casares’ brilliant novella The Invention of Morel.

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The novella, which follows a criminal castaway on a mysterious island, plays with notions of reality, simulacra, immortality, future technology, the surreal, melancholy, and love, and does so with such brilliance that Casares’ mentor and collaborator, the great Jorge Luis Borges, deemed it ‘perfect.’ Poet Octavio Paz shared Borges’ opinion.

     — two snippets from a “short, reference-driven retrospective of Casares’ The Invention of Morel,” in Death+Taxes on the occasion of the 13th anniversary of Casares’ death. Read the whole article here.

Borges in the Library on his Birthday

Google has celebrated Jorge Luis Borge’s birthday with one of their iconic homepage images.

We’ll join in the party with a quotation from his prologue to The Invention of Morel, by his close friend and frequent collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares (they wrote detective stories together under the name H. Bustos Domecq):

Detective stories—another popular genre in this century that cannot invent plots—tell of mysterious events that are later explained and justified by reasonable facts. In this book [The Invention of Morel] Adolfo Bioy Casares easily solves a problem that is perhaps more difficult. The odyssey of marvels he unfolds seems to have no possible explanation other than hallucination or symbolism, and he uses a single fantastic but not supernatural postulate to decipher it. My fear of making premature or partial revelations restrains me from examining the plot and the wealth of delicate wisdom in its execution. Let me only say that Bioy renews in literature a concept that was refuted by St. Augustine and Origen, studied by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and expressed in memorable cadence by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Above is a picture of Borges (left) and Bioy Casares together.