Customer Reviews

The Invention of Morel (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I picked up this book because of the rather extravagant praise from Borges and Paz. Apparently it was inspired by the silent film star Louise Brooks, which makes sense: the entire book is about our capacity to love phantoms. All of us probably remember early infatuations with celebrities who never existed for us as anything but reproductions: on paper, televisions, the movie screen.

Essentially, this book imagines what happens when the reproductions become faithful enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing. It is narrated by a man hiding from the police on a deserted island for an undisclosed crime. One day people appear, and the man quickly falls in love with one of the women; strangely enough, they often disappear for short stretches of time, and seem to repeat the same conversations and actions again and again.

All of this is well-written, but when the explanation is given, all that preceded seems to have been time spent waiting for the a-ha twist: it's only after this point that the book becomes really interesting. I won't give away the story, because the plot is worth getting through yourself: let me mention something that it reminded me of, though.

When Apocalypse Now: Redux came out, they restored scenes of Martin Sheen's brief love affair with a French woman on the river, a storyline completely left out of the original cut. The actress, now an old woman, went to the theatres and saw herself young and beautiful again. And something about her youth is now eternal, or at least as eternal as film proves to be.

I find it completely plausible, for example, that one could find a bundle of old home videos and be so charmed by a woman in them (since I'm a man) that you fall in (some sort of) love with her, even though she is probably either dead now or a completely different woman. But in some way the image of her is real, in the sense that it exists on the tapes and in your own head.

These are some of the ideas that this book plays with and, I must say, it is more fascinating for the ideas it provokes than the narrative itself. In many ways, it feels like second-rate Borges: The Circular Ruins (or a few other stories) stretched to novella length. What Casares should have accomplished with this length is given Faustine (the woman) some sort of character that seemed worthy of the reader's love, and not just the narrator's. At the moment she's a non-entity.

So this story isn't heartbreaking, as the other reviewer (whose flimsy review, frankly, shows no evidence that he actually read the book) tries to say. The Invention of Morel is the work of a talented but not brilliant writer. Perhaps another flaw of this book is that the ideal medium for the story seems to be film; I can see why this was, supposedly, the inspiration for Last Year at Marienbad.

In any case, if these ideas strike you as interesting, I recommend this book. It's really very short, and perhaps not worth paying this much for, since I wouldn't care to have it as part of my permanent collection; I read it first in the library, where it had several short stories from Bioy (NYRB might have included those) as well as several lovely woodcut illustrations.

The cover picture and the blurb on the back indicate that Louise Brooks had something to do with it all....And so, knowing this, I brought what I knew of LB to my reading of 'The Invention of Morel'. As a result, I don't find fault with the character development (as other reviews here do) - why should I? This tale is about the elusive nature of beauty, the mystery of cinema, the hard to pin down quality of a great silent movie actress. To imagine what the narrator experiences - the coming to life of someone who's charisma and beauty resembles that of Louise Brooks - against the backdrop of a strange island, the eerie repetitious jazz music on the phonograph, the at once lush and deadened landscape - is descriptive enough. The narrator never knows the characters - Half-crazed, he doesn't even know himself! This is an absolutely brilliant, highly atmospheric tale.

A character who could be straight out of Borges's "Universal History of Iniquities" takes refuge from the law on a deserted tropical island where he witnesses some pretty strange stuff (I'm trying to be vague here). What seems to begin as the story of a man's slow descent into paranoia turns into what seems like a ghost story before eventually becoming something entirely different - something that could have sprung from the mind of Gene Wolfe or Philip K. Dick on a good day.

I am not a fan of fantasy or science fiction, but occasionally I give the genres another try. My latest attempt was THE INVENTION OF MOREL. Jorge Luis Borges wrote, in the prologue to the novella, that to call it "perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." Octavio Paz said that it "may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel." Given such extravagant praise, how dare one not like it?

I often face the same question when considering modern art. Despite extravagant praise from critics, I don't particularly like much modern art. To me, some of it is bewildering; some of it is simply pretentious; and too much of it is just plain ugly. In reading THE INVENTION OF MOREL, I never really thought it "just plain ugly" (actually, it is imbued with a sort of plangent lyricism), and by the end of the novella I no longer was tempted to think of it as pretentious. But I was left with a rather large measure of bewilderment, and I don't sense (as with Kafka, for instance) that going back and trying to unravel and then decipher and understand the tale will be worth the effort.

The nameless first-person narrator, escaping from the imposition of a criminal sentence, washes up on a deserted island where, curiously enough, there nonetheless is a "museum" with strange and intricate machinery, a chapel, and a swimming pool. After being there a while, a group of "tourists" suddenly appear on the island. The narrator becomes infatuated with one of the women, Faustine (who, judging from the cover of the book, looks a lot like silent movie star Louise Brooks), but, try as he might, he is unable to interact with Faustine. Nor, it turns out, is he able to interact with any of the other tourists, including their apparent leader, Morel. Eventually, the narrator realizes that the weekly activities of the tourists are being repeated, perhaps endlessly. It is all, he learns, because of an elaborate invention of Morel.

Among the themes raised by the novella are the quest for immortality, human loneliness and isolation, the tragic circumstances of love, and solipsism and the mind/body problem. Borges says, in his prologue, that Bioy Casares renews in literature a concept "expressed in memorable cadences" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

I am willing to attribute it to personal idiosyncrasies, but I prefer Rossetti over Bioy Casares. But then, as said, I am not a fan of fantasy or science fiction.

This novel is a metaphor about interpersonal communications, and tells about the transformation of an individual trying to be accepted by a society to which -initially- he doesn't belong. It is based on a wonderful idea, that in my opinion is enough to classify this book as a masterpiece, even if the writing style is not particularly rich. The book has two different layers: its appearance and its not-openly disclosed messages. The appearance is an intriguing novel based on a sci-fi type of idea: a fugitive man escapes to an island populated by people that are totally not interested in him. His initial fear and attempts to hide from them slowly transforms into his desperate wish to interact with them, pushing him up to the final limit when, understood that the people are inanimate, endless cyclic tridimensional representation of a party that happened years before (and that, due to the radiations ejected by the special movie camera used, lead to the death of their actors) the man sacrifice his own life by simulating being one of the group, filming himself with the special cameras and preparing to die for that.
This may be read as a metaphor of the compromises that we accept in order to be part of a society: in the end our feelings, our dreams, our goals are only representations and, when we are finally part of it, our individuality expires.

Quick and fabulous. Saw Sawyer reading it on Lost and had to indulge. Adolfo was inspired by his love for a film actress to write this novel...how applicable the premise is now, to fall in love with someone who exists(ed?) in a certain time and space from you yet in plain view. Tragic, insightful, a definite summer read

this book is incredibly inventive, and bounces off similar ideas by alain robbe-grillet as written in "le voyear", "djin" and "la maison des rendezvous". definitely would recommend all of these to fans of either.

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 am a big fan of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. As such, Amazon kept suggesting I would enjoy this book by Casares. From time to time Amazon's system can really make annoying suggestions (I like Hamlet, so for a month, I had 300 plays by Shakespeare on my recommendation page).

At first glance I thought this was a simple, he-likes-Spanish-language-authors-so-let's-recommend-another recommendation. But the similarity goes deeper. If you like Borges, I believe you will find that this book shares a similar ethos. There is a haunting quality to the protagonist's lonliness and longing.

So if you like Borges, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by Adolfo Bioy Casares and the INVENTION OF MOREL.

It is very hard to review this book without spoiling it. So I will attempt not to.

It is about reality, the self, immortality, adventure and love. All in a very compact format, with a mind bending ending.

If you liked Philip K. Dick's UBIK and other of his short stories of that genre, you may actually love this book.