This month features The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares, New York Review Books, 1590170571, £7.99 |
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This is a strange book.
It is very short – just under a hundred pages, including illustrations. It is beautifully translated and so, I can only assume, beautifully written in the original Spanish.
But to describe it in much more detail would be to give away the trick of it – although trick is too cheap a word.
The Invention of Morel is an island book, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or, more pertinently still, Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau. It takes the form of a diary:
‘I am writing this to leave a record of the adverse miracle. If I am not drowned or killed trying to escape in the next few days, I hope to write two books. I shall entitle them Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus. My books will expose the men who violate the sanctity of forests and deserts; I intend to show that the world is an implacable hell for fugitives, that its efficient police forces, its documents, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and border patrols have made every error of justice irreperable.’
The island on which the fugitive narrator has shipped up is, like Prospero’s, full of voices – and not just voices, there appear to be people there, as well. But they are people who behave in a very strange and repetitious manner. They are a group of gay socialites, the kind you can imagine arriving on a shining white yacht and rowing to the beach with laughter cascading gaily around them.
The narrator falls in love with one of them, Faustine. He watches her as she watches the sunset:
‘She wears a bright scarf over her dark curls; she sits with her hands clasped on one knee; her skin is burnished by prenatal suns; her eyes, her black hair, her bosom make her look like one of the Spanish or gypsy girls in those paintings I detest.’
Faustine is based upon the great silent film actress Louise Brooks, star of Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. (It was her picture on the cover that first attracted me to this book.)
The narrator sees Faustine being pursued by another man, becomes jealous, decides to speak to her, is ignored, finds this strange…
The Invention of Morel is, in the end, about a scientific – although fantastic – invention. One I can’t describe without completely blowing the ending. But the book is also about the artistic invention of Adolfo Bioy Casares.
A younger contemporary and fellow countryman of Borges, Casares published The Invention of Morel in 1940. The two writers became friends and collaborators. Borges supplied a Prologue to the novel, which concludes:
‘To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.’
I think I will need to reread the book again a couple of times (no hardship) to make up my mind on that ‘perfect’. It’s not a word Borges would use without full justification.
The love story of the narrator and Faustine is certainly impeccably forlorn:
‘This was my last chance with Faustine – my last chance to kneel down, to tell her of my love, my life. But I did nothing. It did not seem right, somehow. True, women naturally welcome any sort of tribute. But in this case it would be better to let the situation develop naturally. We are suspicious of a stranger who tells us his life story, who tells us spontaneously that he has been captured, sentenced to life imprisonment, and that we are his reason for living. We are afraid that he is merely tricking us into buying a fountain pen or a bottle with a miniature sailing vessel inside.’
The Invention of Morel doesn’t to trick you into buying anything. Instead, it wants to give you an achingly ironic new metaphysics.
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