Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999)

A man travels to a deserted island and there comes into contact (maybe?) with some people (maybe?) amid some musing on immortality and the soul. It could be science fiction, but Casares published this in 1940 and had a scientific invention present in 1924 that doesn't even exist in 2014. It's South American, praised mightily by Casares's pal Borges, so... call it magical scientism?

Early in the novella the protagonist writes in his diary, "I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness."

This avenue of chasing immortality is still traveled today, usually with the idea of uploading a person's consciousness into some kind of computer device, leaving the physical body behind. Casares here invents a different attempt at traveling this path.

This then serves as the philosophical backbone of the novella, which adopts the trappings of an adventure story, much to the pleasure of Borges, who in his prologue praises such adventure stories as Kafka's "The Trial" and Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" in addition to "The Invention of Morel" for their admirable plots, contrasting them favorably with the "chaotic" and "formless" psychological novel so much in vogue, drearily and tediously aiming to be realistic. Borges will have no truck with realistic tedium, and recommends this story to us as its perfect opposite.… (mere)

I did not like this book. The central concept is interesting and I could imagine a good book around it, but in general it feels stretched out for far too long (even though it's only about 90 pages anyway). I fully admit that I'm likely missing a lot - especially the ending made me think I'd missed some important implications that'd make it more interesting - but personally it didn't really do anything for me, at least not in the mood I'm in.

The narrator is both unlikeable and unrelatable. I get writing a character that's a major creep (in a strange way) but his inner monologue is totally alien and he's also very dense - it takes him ages to work out that the other people can't see or hear him and only then after the book's single plot dump; how does he not realise this after being "spotted" multiple times and ignored and shouting at people and being ignored?. So much of the early book is dedicated to nothing much happening and just having this guy wander around the island and talk a bunch of nonsense. The entire plot, such as it is, is just revealed in one section like 2/3 of the way in, with no extra detail or other explanations. Some stuff brought up near the start never gets explained or talked about again. So everything is left hanging on the "character study", such as it is, but to me it's dull - we see very little of the visitors to the island outside one scene, and the narrator is an obnoxious creep who mostly repeats the same ideas over and over again.

And I guess the key thing is that as a story of unrequited love, it made no sense to me. (big spoilers for the main concept of the story)I don't understand how you can "fall in love" with the recorded, endlessly repeating image of a person or how you can think "the image of me with someone who doesn't love me repeating endlessly on an island which nobody can see is a good substitute for love". Like I'd have thought even an obsession with someone is based on seeing the different things they do as time goes on. I dunno. Maybe I'm totally missing the point. There's maybe something to a feminist reading of what the two main men in the story both think. Both desire to have a certain woman: when she rejects one, he creates the image of a relationship and kills them both. The other creates an image to try and overwrite the image that the other man has created. That's probably the most interesting angle of the story, actually, although it's horrible to read It just totally fell flat, for me.… (mere)

Although this novel is very short, it feels increasingly slow and frustrating toward the midpoint. Rather than a fault, this mood shows its success at getting the reader to identify with its stranded fugitive speaker, who is significantly the aspiring author of two books other than the journal which forms the principal text of The Invention of Morel. The later part of the book involves a crucial anagnorisis and the working out of its consequences.

I was more than a little reminded of The Island of the Day Before, and I feel certain Eco must have read Morel. Although in praising it Borges called this book an "adventure story," I am compelled to view it as a parable.

The moral of Morel: The utmost to be hoped for is a benevolent and capable posthumous editor.… (mere)