“I went back to see her the next afternoon, and the next. There was something freaky about the exact movement and image repeated on all those sets. I recall my almost disbelief when, as a kid, I saw the same image repeated a dozen times when I first saw all those TVs turned to the same station in a department store. “I saw the same room duplicated eight times in eight directions as if it were reflected in mirror.” (page 18) - Again, darn. I was so overwhelmed by the race of giants ‘up there’ on the screen, I fled from the theater minutes after the movie started. ” (page 12) - Darn, if this wasn’t my exact experience when I went to my first movie. From here they look like a race of giants. “They are at the top of the hill, while I am far below. One thing that makes The Invention of Morel so compelling is just how much of what the narrator and others in the novel experience is parallel to a world saturated with films and TV.īelow are a number of quotes from the novel coupled with my reflections: So, one can imagine a sensitive, imaginative literary artist like Adolfo Bioy Casares (born 1914) experiencing silent film in the 1920s as a boy and then sound films as a teenager and young man. In 1940, the year of publication for The Invention of Morel, ideas about what would become TV where "in the air" what really had a grip on people’s imagination in the 1920s and 1930s was film, first silent film then film with sound. Black and White 1940s TV was as raw as raw can be – just look at those 1949 TV shows on You Tube. The first commercially successful sound film, The Jazz Singer, was released in 1929. The 1920s were the heyday of silent films. You might want to read my review AFTER you've read the book.Īnyway, for the purpose of this review, I will take a specific focus: the relationship between the novel and the author’s and our own experience of film and television. Bloy Casares' short novel is akin to Borges' writing in Doctor Brodie’s Report and The Book of Sand, where Borges let go of his more ornate, baroque style.
Similar to stories like The Circular Ruin, The Aleph and many other Borges tales, The Invention of Morel deals with multiple levels of so called reality.
The Invention of Morel is only one hundred pages, not too much longer than a number of Borges’s longer tales.More specifically, here are some obvious similarities between the writing of the two authors: Perhaps Borges’ appraisal reflects, in part, how Adolfo Bioy Casares shares much of his own aesthetic and literary sensibilities since, after all, they collaborated on twelve books. Anybody familiar with the essays and short fiction of Borges can appreciate what it means for one of the great masters of world literature to make such a pronouncement. The Invention of Morel was adjudged a perfect work by Jorge Luis Borges, the author’s mentor/friend/frequent collaborator.
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