Reading the 20th Century discussion
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The Invention of Morel
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The Invention of Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares (April 2026)
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Looking forward to it
Oh good! This has been on my radar for awhile, but the local library doesn't have it - I'll have to ILL or buy it. Which is worth it for a buddy read!
I've just read it and, as I wrote in my brief review: One of the GR tags "science fiction" for this novel must be confusing it with "metaphysical".Loved it!
Now, reading the description from Nigey's opening comment that it inspired the Last Year at Marienbad film, I absolutely see the connection as a concept (not in details). Since I love this film, I can't believe that this association didn't occur to me while reading and the place "Marienbad" was even mentioned in passing!
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Thanks Vesna
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I didn't read the introduction because they usually contain spoilers about the plot, characters, or other aspects in the novel development. But I did read Borges' Prologue and he mentions it too, parenthetically "(the title alludes filially to another island inventor, Moreau)” and then continues that it "brings a new genre to our land and our language”. And earlier in the Prologue:The odyssey of marvels he [Bioy] 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.
That is how it resonated with me in that it really transcends the traditional genres of "supernatural" or science fiction.
I read this last year & plan to read it again for this. I will probably do so next week.In the meantime, I started The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Looking forward to both!
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I'm so glad there's a few of us going to (re)read this one.
The book's intro also mentions the friendship and mutual respect between Bioy and Borges. Apparently Borges was a real mentor figure whilst Bioy was developing his voice.
I've read a bit of Borges and, to be frank, have found it all quite hard work. By contrast this is very accessible so far, and yet retains a striking strangeness and originality.
I've only read about 15 pages but am hoping to read a big chunk this evening, maybe all of it as it's so short. I suspect it's best read in large chunks, or a single sitting.
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I love the writing.
It a real genre mashup which reads like a survival thriller crossed with a philosophical fever dream.
The narrator is flawed, paranoid, and lonely and seems to be slowly losing his mind
For such a slim volume it is packing a significant amount of existential dread and provocative ideas.
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I am now pondering the question that if a simulation becomes indistinguishable from reality, does the distinction between the two eventually cease to matter?
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Incredibly prescient.
Bioy Casares taps into our modern desire to curate reality. The Invention of Morel feels less like 1940s sci fi and more like a warning about our current relationship with technology and memory. Thinking here of digital footprints, social media archives, AI-generated deadbots etc
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I'm looking forward to discovering what everyone else makes of it
It's so short it can be read in a couple of hours, less for the speedier readers in the group
Here's my review...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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Well, I'm relieved to hear you say that, RC. I read this yesterday and have to confess it left me cold. This joins Borges and a lot of Marquez's writing which I feel I should enjoy more than I actually do.And I am a fan of classic sci-fi from this era and before, so it's not a genre thing per se.
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My response to this recalls my response to The Unconsoled.
I thought it was going to get interesting when the narrator draws attention to the text as his journal and we have a mysterious editor inserting corrections as footnotes. But isn't the 'invention' just like a camera that replays via the strange machines in the museum? We still interact physically and emotionally with films shot in the past featuring actors who no longer exist but with whom we can create an emotional bond...?
I don't know, I'm just not getting this. Please, someone who loved it, do tell me what I'm missing.
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Rather than feeling modern, though, to me there was that throwback to old superstitions about cameras and photographs as stealing the soul of the sitter - I was skimming a bit so might be wrong but wasn't that what Morel's invention was essentially doing?
All the same, my understanding is that only what has been recorded plays back on a continual loop so it's not like The Matrix, for example. The recording can't escape the time limit of the loop and the loop replays in the same way every time - so even if the recording absorbs the 'soul' of the person, they're still trapped in a single simulation - is that correct?
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I am a Borges fan and it's then no surprise that I loved it. I experienced it rather differently, more in a philosophical sense as the search for eternal life, that the "invention" represents a human search to overcome mortality and recreate life, i.e., be like God. There is also ambiguity, at least to me, about the island's "visitors". At one point he "remembers" some scenes, as if they are from his past and probably dead, and the"invention" can keep them alive in perpetuity (above all, his love "Faustine"). So the Time and memories are also woven into one of the layers. It's also possible that these may well have been hallucinations of a man on his deathbed, hence the editor's notes... I think the book is open to a few different interpretations depending on the reader.
I was at first surprised to read Nigey's interpretation because it didn't cross my mind (I guess being immersed in the Borgesian type of reading) but then I saw how it's indeed yet another angle to read into it. It was refreshing to recognize how the "invention" can be interpreted from a different angle, tied more to the technology in replicating the reality as we witness it in current times (argh, that monstrous AI, ultimately flawed for it cannot replicate the human consciousness). That's so great about the group reading.
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Thanks
It's definitely a philosophical novel and, as you say, open to multiple interpretations
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For whatever reason - and I'm not usually a literal reader - this book just didn't spark for me. I couldn't see it as about immortality as it was just capturing people in a short looped recording so the same scenes played in perpetuity. And I didn't believe in that love for Faustina - though I did wonder about her name.
I was reminded of the wonderful Piranesi with all those descriptions of the rooms and architecture of the buildings and now wonder if this was one of the influences on Clarke?
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Thank you, Nigey and RC.RC, it seems to me that all those details about the machine, similar to the detailed description of the island on so many pages at the opening that it made it a bit slow start for me, meant to make us believe in the reality of the narrator's "story" ... but if we interpret it allegorically, then the "invention" can take on a whole new meaning (again, the multi-layered narrative makes it open to a reader's fancy about what it's about). But it's true that such minutiaes may have been too exhaustive to work on all readers as a literary device for something else...
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Interesting you should say that, Vesna, as I thought the way there is an unnamed editor who inserts footnotes into the journal-text we're reading was also pointing to the artificiality of the narrative and even undermining it at times as the footnote undoes what the journal-narrator has told us. But, for whatever reason, that didn't seem to intersect strongly enough with the 'invention' story for me. I think I just have to write this off as a book where I have an unaccountable blind spot!
I haven't read a lot of Borges but I do like his stories which have a literary/textual slant so things like the library, the Don Quixote story etc. But some others have escaped me.
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I thought it also worked as a novel which grapples with the loneliness and desperation of the human condition, and the lengths some people go to for love
You?
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Nope, none of that there for philistine me!
That whole trope of 'I saw a beautiful women who never even saw me but I loved her instantly and forever anyway' just doesn't really work for me. Unless the author, like Proust, is actually dissecting the illusions, fantasies and fetishisation as part of the work the book is doing.
I did wonder about her name, though: Faustine - a Faustian pact? Signing away his soul for something that amounts to little and consigns him to an immortality in hell?
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That’s plausible, assuming it works in Spanish too, which it should
Roman Clodia wrote: "Nigeyb wrote: "How did you find it as a love story?"Nope, none of that there for philistine me!
That whole trope of 'I saw a beautiful women who never even saw me but I loved her instantly and ..."
Yup, what RC said.
For the first half of the book, it seemed the narrator was insane in an uninteresting way. In the second half he still seemed crazy but in the context of a weird and implausible "science experiment."
In either case, I found the instant passion for Faustine and his whole attitude toward her not only bizarre, but patronizing, patriarchal, and disturbing.
I read this a while back, but I have to say my take aligns with RC and Rose...
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Isn't it remarkable how dramatically opinions can diverge when it comes to literature?
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The brevity and sparseness forces the reader to project
Perhaps what we find says more about us than the book?
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Yes, it probably does. I didn't find much to work with other that the literal, clearly. Perhaps all the material details of the machinery dampened any more spiritual or philosophical speculations from me - anything mechanical can do that to me.
Btw, what did everyone expect from the title? I'd assumed before reading that it was about the 'creation' of Morel, not his actual mechanical 'invention' of a weird machine.
Nigeyb wrote: "How did you find it as a love story?"It worked for me at that level too and there is one of several passages that made me think that "Faustine" is someone from his past ("Elisa"?) whom he lost or, alternatively, from whom he will irrevocably part if he is himself dying. Either way, it causes him pain and an utter sense of loneliness without her:
And you, Elisa, … in each memory you seem more like Faustine … while I look at Faustine, I shall not forget you—and I thought I did not love you!
And then my heart was about to be broken into pieces when I read this penultimate passage:
My soul has not yet passed to the image; if it had, I would have died, I (perhaps) would no longer see Faustine, and would be with her in a vision that no one can ever destroy.
Yes, this novel definitely speaks to us in different ways...
There is a new translation coming up this fall in the UK (Penguin), in the hands of the wonderful Margaret Jull Costa, and I plan to reread it to see if it would have the same effect on me. And also to uncover any other layers that I might have missed.
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Vesna, please report back once you've read the new translation. Different translators can make a significant difference
I will. RC asked a good question about the book title, which also puzzles me, and I am wondering if a new translation would make it clearer.... or perhaps Bioy intentionally made it ambiguous.
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Vesna wrote: "I will. RC asked a good question about the book title, which also puzzles me, and I am wondering if a new translation would make it clearer.... or perhaps Bioy intentionally made it ambiguous."
I read it in Spanish - while the title could certainly be read both ways in Spanish as well - the English could have been "The Invention of Morel" or "Morel's Invention" - in Spanish there's no other way to show possession with a noun other than the 'of' option, so it doesn't immediately read as ambiguously as it does in English, and I read it being something Morel invented (as the story does then seem to imply), the other interpretation didn't occur to me till you mentioned it. So the translation is literally what it is in Spanish, but it does seem that the translator did make a choice, as it's much easier to read as the other option the way it's translated to English.
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Isn't that Louise Brooks on the cover of the NYRB edition? Which links the fictional narrative to authorial obsession and makes the text and 'real life' porous. Not that I have any ideas that make sense of any of this!
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I was thinking of Piranesi, especially his prison drawings which included huge and menacing machines. He also intersects with the classical references that we've noted.
And, reading Morel today, there's an interesting dialogue with Susanna Clarke's novel, Piranesi:
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Reading them makes me wonder if I should go back for a second go. The first time I was more concerned with the narrative. It might be very instructive to go back and focus on the details
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Yes, great posts, Alwynne! I look forward to your final thoughts when you finish it.Nigey, let me know if you decide to read it again when Jull Costa's translation comes out this fall. I'm holding off my re-read until then.
I'm experiencing this novel the same way as watching The Last Year at Marienbad - new angles emerge on each re-watch.
Alwynne wrote: "It seems very centred on detail, part of that presumably designed to give a sense of verisimilitude - in line with the subgenre of SF/speculative fiction - but think it goes beyond device here."That's how I experienced it too. We chatted a bit about it earlier up on the thread. I understand why it didn't work like that for everyone though, but it did for me.
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Yes, and the effect on me was to limit my philosophical/symbolic imagination and to follow this in the literal essayistic way we've discussed.
Reading the 20th Century
Books mentioned in this topic
Piranesi (other topics)The Invention of Morel (other topics)
Piranesi (other topics)
The Unconsoled (other topics)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Susanna Clarke (other topics)Silvina Ocampo (other topics)
H.G. Wells (other topics)
Adolfo Bioy Casares (other topics)
The Invention of Morel
by
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Apparently it's a slim, mind-bending novella from Argentina. It’s part sci-fi, part psychological thriller about a fugitive on a deserted island who discovers a machine that can project "real" ghosts.
All are welcome
Come and get involved - a mere 103 pages
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 at Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.