The Invention of Morel by 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.

Goodreads description

The Invention of Morel is one of those books which exist on the boundary of genres - magic realism, science fiction, philosophical fiction. But that does not matter, so often the best books are the most uncategorisable.  This is an amazing book:  only 100 pages long and yet so full of ideas, published in 1940 and yet so modern, indeed it is prescient in some of the ideas and themes, and as for the plot, well all I can say is Borges was right, this is a masterpiece. 

The book is written as a journal by a fugitive from the law, who in order to escape his punishment comes to an island that has the reputation of being a place of death, where everything, including anyone who visits, is dying. What crime the fugitive has committed (if any) is not made clear. Bioy Casares' approach is a class example of "less is more" in writing. A lesser writer might have been tempted to create a backstory, but by not doing so Bioy Casares not only keeps the story lean and to the point, but also introduces doubt and allows us to project our ideas on to the story. 

One day the fugitive sees a group of people in the villa, known as the museum, on the hill that overlooks the island. Among these newcomers is a beautiful woman, Faustine, with whom the fugitive falls in love from a distance. As detailed in the Goodreads description, Faustine was inspired by the author's obsession with the silent movie star Louise Brooks. 

‘To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares—to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existence of a ghost).’

  

The fugitive's account has a nightmare quality. He is both terrified that he will be discovered -  indeed that the whole thing is a cruel trick on him by his pursuers - and unable to interact with Faustine and the others. He watches them from behind curtains, inside giant urns and as he realises that they cannot or will not see him. Then there are strange occurences - people appear and disappear, scenes are re-enacted, there are two suns in the sky, objects reappear in exactly the same place as a week earlier. And then there is the constant sense of death and decay - dead fish in the swimming pool, flowers wilting, etc.  We and the fugitive begin to wonder what is real. Bioy Casares introduces some footnotes by a fictional editor  just to add another level of uncertainty.

The most complete and total perception not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows, we ourselves are shadows.

There is a reason for these strange occurences and that is the invention of Morel (Morel organised the group's island trip). More than that I cannot tell you without spoiling the book, although knowing will not prevent me from reading the book again. However I will read it with a different eye, seeing, I am sure, the brilliantly plotted clues that I missed or misread the first time, and enjoying the development  of philosophical themes. 

I commend this book to you. 

PS If this reminds you of the TV series Lost, it probably should do. The series seems to have been influenced by the novella, and if you look closely that influence is acknowledged on the screen when Sawyer is shown reading the book. But then as the Goodreads description says this is a hugely influential novel. 

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

Shortly after the 1989 publication of Women Without Men in her native Iran, Shahrnush Parsipur was arrested and jailed for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality. Now banned in Iran, this small masterpiece was eventually translated into several languages and introduces U.S. readers to the work of a brilliant Persian writer. With a tone that is stark, and bold, Women Without Men creates an evocative allegory of life for contemporary Iranian women. In the interwoven -destinies of five women, simple situations—such as walking down a road or leaving the house—become, in the tumult of post-WW II Iran, horrific and defiant as women escape the narrow confines of family and society—only to face daunting new challenges.

Goodreads description

What the description above does not say is just how beautiful this novella is. Women Without Men does tackle the issues facing Iranian women, but it does so in a magical and poetic way. Magic realism is used to make bearable and visible the oppression these women face and to give voice to their dreams. 

I am not surprised this book so shocked the Iranian establishment. We see behind the veil into the lives, hopes and disappointments of the five woman. One is murdered by her brother for dishonouring the family, although all she did was to leave the family home for a few days. She rises from the dead, able to read the thoughts of those around her. Another, in her desire and need to be loved by a man, acts as an accomplice to the murderer only to be betrayed by him. One turns into a tree in order to protect her virginity while expressing her sexual desire. Another, a prostitute, leaves the brothel when she starts seeing men as having no heads. The fifth is a beautiful wife, who kills her controlling husband by accident, and buys the garden that becomes the refuge for the other women and herself. 

Women's sexuality, its suppression and indeed the denial of its existence by the patriarchal Iranian society is at the heart of the book. Parsipur shows that this denial is destructive of the relationship between men and women. Men are shown to suffer by their failure to see the truth about women. For example, the murderer marries a girl who is outwardly everything a good Iranian girl should be: very beautiful, soft and quiet, modest, shy, diligent, hard-working, dignified, chaste, and neat. She wears a chador, always looks down when she is in the street and blushes constantly. But he has been deceived.  

Interestingly there is a sixth occupant of the garden - a man known only as the Good Gardener. His behaviour is shown in contrast to that of other men. He is a nurturer and lover of women. He enables the tree to bear fruit and marries the former prostitute and fathers a child by her, but the child is not a baby but a lily. The garden he creates changes the women in  different ways; not all are magically transformed, two simply are able to reconsider and reset their relationship with men. A key point is that none of the women, including the tree, stay in the garden once it has worked its magic. The long-term answer is not for women to live separate from the man's world. 

I recommend this book to you. It may be short but it holds far more than many books four times its length.

Two Dogs at the One Dog Inn by David John Griffin

Dogs are reported for their constant barking … and so begins one of the strangest stories you will ever read.

Audrey Ackerman, sent to visit the dogs at a 17th century coach house, is unsettled by paranormal sightings.

Stella Bridgeport – manager at The Animal Welfare Union – communicates with Audrey via emails. And those Stella receives are as startling as they are incredible: descriptions of extraordinary events concerning a science fiction writer’s journal; giant swans; bizarre android receptionist; a ghost dog.

Insanity or fantasy? Fact or fiction? The only given is, it all starts and ends with two dogs at The One Dog Inn.

David John Griffin

This is another book by one of the members of the Magic Realism Books Facebook group and it goes to show what a talented bunch we are. 

 Two Dogs at the One Dog Inn is a novella, but it packs a lot into its 87 pages. Something very strange has happened at the One Dog Inn, something that has sent an otherwise rational and competent Audrey to the edge of a breakdown. The two women exchange emails with Stella trying to come up with rational answers, and angering Audrey in the process: ear infections, hallucinatory chemicals, a film set, going insane, but nothing accounts for what Audrey encountered. The email exchange worked well, establishing both women as credible and sympathetic characters. 

Then Audrey sends Stella some other material - a long (too long in my opinion) extract of a history of the One Dog Inn and its hauntings and the files from a memory stick that one of the dogs digs up from the inn's courtyard. These files contain an account of a stay at the inn by a science fiction novelist, plus notes about the novel he is writing.  The novelist's account seems to support Audrey's experience, even if Stella stills sees it as fiction.

This is a very clever book. It plays with all sorts of familiar elements and gives them a twist - ghostly hounds, gothic inns, secret tunnels, automata. Do we get a final answer? What do you think?

One issue I had with the novel was the author's practice of replacing names of real-world items  with made-up ones - so an iPad is referred to as an iNote, the story is set in a fictitious English county called Kantem, presumably Kent. I am not sure why the author did this. The effect was to distract me from the story as I worked out what he was referring to. It seems to me that a major part of the success of magic realism is the establishment of the real in the story. So it would have been better to set the story in Kent referencing identifiable towns. Then the contrast with the strange happenings would have been more pronounced. 

A really enjoyable novella. I gather that David has another book out anytime now. I will look out for it.

I received this book from the author in return for a fair review.