The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares is a well regarded masterpiece and an important part of Latin American literature. So I feel incredibly provincial since I had never even heard of it until earlier this year. And I’ve finally read it and it was worth the read.
The Invention of Morel is a short work, really a novella. So I’d recommend going out and reading it because I cannot discuss it without spoiling it entirely.
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The Invention of Morel may be about an unreliable narrator alone on an island full of holograms but it might also be about an unreliable narrator alone on an island who is going completely mad. It definitely discuses the nature of what is real.
An unnamed political refugee fleeing from persecution manages to reach a mysterious island that allegedly has a disease that kills everyone who lands there. He discovers a complex that includes a huge building that is called a museum. Seriously, the description of this elaborate building is insane. It would be bizarre in a major city, let alone a deserted island.
Then a group of vacationers suddenly appear in the museum. The unnamed refugee, who is terrified of being captured, hides from them in the marshlands, where he has to deal with dangerous tides and malnutrition. Despite his fear, he spies on the vacationers and develops an obsession with a beautiful woman named Faustine.
Eventually, the refugee figures out that the vacationers are just recordings, endlessly replaying the same week. A power cut had turned it off when he first arrived. More than that, we learned that the process of being recorded is lethal. The inventor Morel tricked his friends into coming to the island so he could spend an endless week with the woman he was in love with.
The refugee is able to splice himself into the recoding so he had spend eternity with a woman he has never actually known, dying in the process.
Wow. There is a lot to unpack.
First of all, the narrator is definitely unreliable. In fact, the footnotes from the fictional editors seem to be specifically designed to hammer home the inconsistencies in his journal. His obsession with Faustine is raw and uncomfortable. At the same time, he is under such extreme conditions that his instability makes him believable.
While I used the word hologram earlier, the recordings actually replicate people and objects for all five senses. Which opens up the question of what is real. The narrator wonders if the recordings think the thoughts that the originals had at the time, if they have their souls.
And there is the fact that the people who get recorded die. In fact, their deaths resemble radiation poisoning. Does the process kill them or do their lives get absorbed into the recordings?
Morel’s decision to commit suicide and murder almost all his friends is completely psychotic but the narrator sympathizes with him. The reader (and quite possibly Casares) might strongly question if the recordings are the same as the original but the narrator buys into the idea. For me, this was less about are the recordings being ‘real’ and more how these recordings affect someone who is crazy.
The Invention of Morel doesn’t give us its own answer for what is real or what makes up reality. One interpretation is that the recordings aren’t even real in story and the narrator is a raving lunatic. It does give us plenty of food for thought. I like being asked to think.
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