The Invention of Morel (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – June 12, 2025

The Invention of Morel was adjudged a perfect work by Jorge Luis Borges, the author's mentor/friend/frequent collaborator. Anybody familiar with the essays and short fiction of Borges can appreciate what it would mean for one of the great masters of world literature to make such a pronouncement. Perhaps part of Borges's appraisal reflects how Adolfo Bioy Casares does indeed share much of his same aesthetic and literary sensibilities (after all, they collaborated on 12 books). More specifically, here are some obvious similarities between the writing of the two authors:* The Invention of Morel is only 100 pages, not too much longer than Borges's longer tales.* Similar to stories like The Circular Ruin and The Aleph, and many, if not most of Borges's other tales, The Invention of Morel deals with more than one level of `reality'.* The language and writing is beautiful (this comes through in English translation). This short novel is more like Borges writing in Doctor Brodie's Report and The Book of Sand, where Borges, for the most part, let go of his more ornate, baroque style.Since a number of people have made more general comments about this novel, for the purpose of this review, I will focus on one aspect of this work: the relationship between the novel and the author's and our experience of film and television.The 1920s are the heyday of silent films. The first commercially successful sound film, The Jazz Singer, was released in 1929. Black and White 1940s TV was as raw as raw can be - just look at those 1949 TV shows on You Tube. In 1940 (the year The Invention of Morel was published) ideas about what would become TV where `in the air'; what really had a grip on people's imagination in the 1920s and 1930s was film, first silent film then sound film.So, one can imagine a sensitive, imaginative literary artist like Adolfo Bioy Casares (born 1914) experiencing silent film in the 1920s as a boy and then sound films as a teenager and young man. One thing that makes The Invention of Morel so compelling is just how much of what the narrator and others in the novel experience is parallel to the reader's experience of a world saturated with films and TV and now, the virtual reality of the computer age.Here are a number of quotes from the novel coupled with my reflections:"They are at the top of the hill, while I am far below. From here they look like a race of giants . . ." (page 12) ---- Darn, if this wasn't my exact experience when I went to my first movie. I was so overwhelmed by the race of giants `up there' on the screen, I fled from the theater minutes after the movie started."I saw the same room duplicated eight times in eight directions as if it were reflected in mirror." (page 18) --- Again, darn. I recall my almost disbelief when, as a kid, I saw the same image repeated a dozen times when I first saw all those TVs turned to the same station in a department store. There was something freaky about the exact movement and image repeated on all those sets."I went back to see her the next afternoon, and the next. She was there, and her presence began to take on the quality of a miracle." (page 25) How many teenagers, young men and women and even older adults have fallen in love with a movie star and go back to the movies to see their loved one the next night and the next?" . . . words and movements of Faustine and the bearded man coincided with those of a week ago. The atrocious eternal return." (page 41) In a way, isn't that the world of movies - the same exact people doing exactly the same thing night after night up there on the screen. Live performances and live theater doesn't even come close to the movie's eternal return." . . . horrified by Faustine, who was so close to me, actually might be on another planet." (page 53) How many men and women who have fallen in love with a star in a film or on a TV show where they are so close they can press their hands against the star's face (the TV screen) come to realize their emotions and feelings are for a being a universe away, far beyond their actual touch.""Tea for Two" and "Valencia" persisted until after dawn." (page 62) Most appropriate! Films and TV thrive on easy-to-remember songs and jingles."I began to search for waves and vibrations that had previously been unattainable, to devise instruments to receive and transmit them." (page 69). It is as if the author were touching into the collective unconscious desire in 1940 to expand film in different ways, one way being what would become TV." I was certain that my images of persons would lack consciousness of themselves (like the characters in a motion picture)." (page 70) This is part of a 3+ page reflection by Morel. There is a lot here. One reflection: how many people have sacrificed their flesh-and-blood existential reality to make it as a star up there on the silver screen? What happens to the soul of the people in a city (Los Angeles, for example) when the city is taken over by an entire industry dedicated to producing films and shows populated by stars?I recall a quote from the main character in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he goes into a roadside diner and can't get the waitress's attention because she is watching TV. He says, "I don't exist since I'm not on TV."

One would not readily connect the fantasy of Poe, the science fiction of Verne, the surreal existentialism of Kafka, or the theories of the French nouveau roman. But this 100-page novella by Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares, first published in 1940, manages to make the link. Jorge Luis Borges, the dedicatee, who also wrote the preface, describes the book as one of the rare "works of reasoned imagination" written in Spanish. By this, he appears to mean a work of wild fantasy which nonetheless proceeds according to a logic that raises existential issues that remain even after the story has concluded.Before I delve too deep into pseudo-academic seriousness, let me say that it is a simply delightful book, beautifully presented by the NYRB press, with original drawings in a mild Cubist style by Norah Borges de Torre that are evocative without being limiting. The story has almost a TREASURE ISLAND quality; an escaped convict, wrongly accused, finds himself marooned on a tropical island. Not a virgin paradise, more a civilization abandoned; at the top of the hill, there are a monumental museum, a swimming pool, and a chapel; think of one of those empty squares painted by De Chirico. But then other people appear out of nowhere, only to vanish again. Dressed in old-fashioned style, they listen to music from the twenties on a phonograph, play tennis, or stand around talking as though guests at a summer house-party. Among them is a woman the others call Faustine, to whom the narrator becomes immediately attracted. I cannot say much more without giving away the delightful point of the story. Surrealism turns to science fiction (Bioy clearly pays homage to H. G. Welles' THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU), but the shifts of genre do not stop there. By the final pages, he is dealing with the nature of life, the meaning of reality, and the impossibility of desire -- though the book remains more playful and lucid than any attempt to explain it!Inspired apparently by Bioy's fascination with the movie actress Louise Brooks (pictured on the cover), this is a book that could not have been written without the invention of the cinema, and it had a significant influence on the cinema. Director Alain Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet cite it as one of the principal influences on their epochal film LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. For sure, Bioy's tropical island is very different from the pristine parterres in that movie. But the sense of fashionable people appearing from nowhere and disappearing, of lovers meeting as strangers across the divide of time, of a world at once familiar and obeying its own inscrutable rules, all this clearly comes from Bioy's novella. And the two works explore similar issues: how life may be traduced by memory, and, in a media world, how facsimiles become more cogent than reality itself.

I had no idea what to expect of this book and I think that’s the best way to go in to it! Clever and unique writing style that keeps you reading even if it’s a very, very slow paced book. I felt like by the end I had no idea what or who to believe and it felt like you were diving into madness right alongside the protagonist. Good read for a plane ride/trip as it’s pretty short!