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.

The Invention of Morel

"A fugitive hides on a deserted island somewhere in Polynesia. Tourists arrive, and his fear of being discovered becomes a mixed emotion when he falls in love with one of them. He wants to tell her his feelings, but an anomalous phenomenon keeps them apart."--Wikipedia.org.

always such a nice surprise to encounter stories like this or daphne du maurier’s 

something about predating books with the same science fiction elements and preoccupations by a surprising period of time and thereby spinning an angle on it that’s untouched by anything you can call genre convention.

the literal timelessness doesn’t really work for 

maybe not flawlessly, but i think it weaves an interesting breadth of ideas about time, haunting, & the narratives we cobble together from mere concepts even as the lives we sensationalize strain to exceed the cookie cutter limits we place on them for our own ends. not a book i’m in love with, yet also unlikely to be one i’ll forget. 

always such a nice surprise to encounter stories like this or daphne du maurier’s the house on the strand... something about predating books with the same science fiction elements and preoccupations by a surprising period of time and thereby spinning an angle on it that’s untouched by anything you can call genre convention.

the literal timelessness doesn’t really work for the house on the strand; i’m glad it does for morel. maybe not flawlessly, but i think it weaves an interesting breadth of ideas about time, haunting, & the narratives we cobble together from mere concepts even as the lives we sensationalize strain to exceed the cookie cutter limits we place on them for our own ends. not a book i’m in love with, yet also unlikely to be one i’ll forget. 

jess

the elucidation of every prose written is beautifully written. feels like veneering through a mystifying fog of our memories with random spurs of thoughts and events in loop as it's a work of "reasoned imagination" - brings forth the nostalgia for a time that never really existed but which our memories have tricked us into believing are real. you could say that the process our narrator goes through is a literal interpretation of what our own brain does when, given enough time, it alters our memory of past events and paints a more pleasing image, or a complete askew one. it also convoluted the idea that memory has never worked in a very linear way - one scene could slowly dissolve away into nothingness or anything could easily come to fruition, and that idea in this slim and compact book, is narrated quite, intangible yet strangely personal. a re-read would bring more justice to this 3.5 star i gave.

iamazoo

blew my mind! & coincidentally feels like a very timely read.

Nelson Zagalo

A minha análise: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Fraser Simons

A man chronicles his strange journey while marooned on an island with strange machinery in his diary. As he obsessively dissects the island with his considerable perception to understanding what is happening, he, in turn, ends up disassembling and learning more about himself. 

This book is masterful in its thematic throughline. I have always been fascinated with perspective and perception. Without feedback from other people, we become disturbingly reliant on motivated thinking. It is so crucial to a persons' identity that we interact with other people; without it we never really know ourselves at all. How much of what we see is actually just a projection of ourselves? Without any means of distinction, reality takes on an unknowable Otherness. 

With the stream of consciousness that fits very well with a diary written in blissful, straightforward prose, the mind of the man cultivates almost uncanny anticipation of the readers’ thoughts. Even as he does something absurd, or has not taken something crucial into account, or is overly cruel in his observations—you have only to turn the page and discover he himself knows this and wrestles with the same problem. 

It’s also more frenetic than a modern thriller, almost genre-bending as our man desperately tries to make sense of the goings-on. And as such, the reader establishes synchronicity with the story as it unfolds. Something of a feat given how old the text is. It still feels fresh and original and regards a human experience that will forever be, (ironically, if you’ve read it), timeless. 

It made me think about more than that. But any more would be considerable spoilers and this is a book with a reading experience where the less you know, the better, in my opinion.

Donald

I will save my real review until after the book group meets next week, but this book is very strange and very good.

Prashant Prasad

“I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.”

This was great. Adding it to the list of books set on an island where the character(s) go insane - might be my favourite genre.

Gary Homewood

** spoiler alert **
           Satisfyingly strange and eerie sci-fi fantasy predicting a media saturated world, proto holograms of dead people, solipsism, a love obsession with a chimera. Inspired the movie Last Year At Marienbad, which now makes a lot more sense to me!

The Invention of Morel

Reviews