The Invention of Morel: Adolfo Bioy Casares’s Novel of a Fugitive, an Island and a Machine That Captures Life
Told in the first person, this science-fiction story deals with love, loneliness, death and something very like virtual reality. It takes the form of a diary in which the narrator, a fugitive who has taken refuge on a remote island, records what may or may not be his own hallucinations.
Author: Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999)
Title: The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel, 1940)
Format: English paperback (NYRB Classics), with a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges, 120 pages
Scope: Short novel; science fiction and fantasy
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1590170571 (ASIN 1590170571)
Morel’s Machine
Morel’s machine records images of real people and captures them permanently. A great technological advance has made the invention possible, and with it the novel raises profound questions that all of us ask ourselves at some point.
Faustine
Faustine is the reason and the cause of this creation: her memory makes Morel want to see her again, and so he invents the machine. The novel speculates on the limits and possibilities of a kind of virtual heaven: the idea of meeting our loved ones again one day, of revisiting our memories and being with the people we know in a calm and pleasant setting.
The Fugitive and the Island
The narrator is a Venezuelan writer on the run from a prison sentence, who has been told that a deserted island in the Pacific is the perfect hiding place, since a mysterious disease keeps visitors away. There he finds a museum, a chapel and a swimming pool, apparently abandoned, until one day a group of elegant holidaymakers appears, dancing to old records and strolling on the hills. The narrator hides from them, but he cannot stop watching one woman, Faustine, who sits every evening on the rocks looking at the sunset.
Love and Obsession
The heart of the novel is the narrator’s growing love for Faustine, who never seems to notice him, however close he comes. His attempts to attract her attention are both comic and heartbreaking, and when he discovers why she cannot respond, he faces a terrible choice. The ending, which we will not reveal, is one of the most haunting in Latin American literature, a meditation on what we would sacrifice to stay forever with the person we love.
Bioy Casares and Borges
Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) was an Argentine writer from a wealthy family, married to the writer Silvina Ocampo and a lifelong friend of Jorge Luis Borges. The two collaborated on many books, including humorous detective stories under the joint pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq, and edited influential anthologies of fantastic literature. Bioy received the Cervantes Prize, the highest honour in Spanish-language literature, in 1990, but The Invention of Morel remains his most celebrated work.
A Nod to H. G. Wells
The very name Morel echoes Doctor Moreau, the scientist of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, another story about a mad inventor on a remote island. Bioy was a great admirer of English adventure and science fiction, and his novel combines that tradition with the metaphysical games so characteristic of Argentine literature in those years.
A Long Afterlife
The novel has inspired filmmakers, artists and writers. Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) owes a clear debt to it, and the book even appears on screen in the television series Lost, whose mysterious island it seems to anticipate. It has been translated into many languages and is regularly listed among the great novels of the twentieth century.
Why Read It
Borges, in his famous prologue, called its plot perfect. Short, strange and haunting, it anticipates by decades our debates about recording, simulation and virtual worlds, and it inspired, among others, Last Year at Marienbad.
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