The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

Inspired by Bioy Casares's fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction's now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year in Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999) was born to rich parents in Buenos Aires. He began writing in the early 1930s, and his stories were published in the prestigious journal Sur, where he met his wife, Silvina Ocampo, a painter and writer, as well as Jorge Luis Borges, who would become his mentor, friend, and collaborator. After a series of mediocre efforts, Bioy wrote The Invention of Morel in 1940, the first of his books to satisfy him and the first in which he struck his trademark weird and surprisingly frightening comedy. Stories and novels such as A Plot for Escape, A Dream of Heroes, and Asleep in the Sun were later published. Borges and Bioy also worked on an Anthology of Weird Literature and a series of sarcastic drawings under the pseudonym H.

Bustos Domecq, Bustos Domecq, Bustos Domecq Ten novels, numerous collections of short stories, poetry, and essays, three volumes of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's Saint Glinglin are among James Sallis's works. He writes a monthly column for The Boston Globe and reviews for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other publications. Suzanne Jill Levine is a Latin American literary scholar who has translated works by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Manuel Puig, among others.

Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions is Levine's most recent book. She is a lecturer in the University of California, Santa Barbara's Spanish Department.