Adolfo Bioy Casares

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Bioy Casares in 1968
Born September 15, 1914
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died March 8, 1999 (aged 84)
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Resting place La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Occupation Writer, poet, critic, librarian
Language Spanish
Nationality Argentine
Notable works The Invention of Morel
Notable awards Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1991)

Adolfo Bioy Casares (Spanish pronunciation: [aˈðolfo ˈβjoi kaˈsaɾes]; September 15, 1914 – March 8, 1999) was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, and translator. He was a friend and frequent collaborator with his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges, and wrote what many consider one of the best pieces of fantastic fiction, the novella The Invention of Morel.

Biography

Adolfo Bioy Casares was born in Buenos Aires, the grandson of a wealthy landowner and dairy processor, and the descendant of Patrick Lynch, a successful Irish emigrant. He wrote his first story ("Iris y Margarita") at the age of eleven.

Bioy wrote many stories with Jorge Luis Borges under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq after they were introduced in 1932 by Victoria Ocampo, whose sister, Silvina Ocampo (1903–1994), Bioy Casares was to marry in 1940. In 1954 she also adopted Bioy's daughter with another woman, Marta Bioy Ocampo (1954–94), who was killed in an automobile accident just three weeks after Silvina Ocampo's death, leaving two children. The estate of Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares was awarded by a Buenos Aires court to yet another love child of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Fabián Bioy.Fabián Bioy died, aged 40, in February 2006.

Bioy won several awards, including the Gran Premio de Honor of SADE (the Argentine Society of Writers, 1975), the French Legion of Honour (1981), the Diamond Konex Award of Literature (1994) the title of Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires (1986), and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (awarded to him in 1991 in Alcalá de Henares). Adolfo Bioy Casares is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires.

In 2006 Ediciones Destino published a book of Bioy's diary entries on Borges, numbering 1663 pages of anecdotes, witticisms and observations.

Works

The best-known novel by Bioy Casares is La invención de Morel (The Invention of Morel). It is the story of a man who, evading justice, escapes to an island said to be infected with a mysterious fatal disease. Struggling to understand why everything seems to repeat, he realizes that all the people he sees there are actually recordings, made with a special machine, invented by Morel, which is able to record not only three-dimensional images, but also voices and scents, making it all indistinguishable from reality. The story mixes realism, fantasy, science fiction and terror. Borges wrote a famous prologue in which he called it a work of "reasoned imagination" and linked it to H. G. Wells' oeuvre. Both Borges and Octavio Paz described the novel as "perfect." The story is held to be the inspiration for Alan Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad[1] and also an influence on the TV series Lost.

Novels and Novelas

Short Story Collections

Generally, these Spanish-language collections have not been systematically translated into English. English language collections include:

Essays

Miscellanies (mixed collections of stories, poems, essays, reflections, aphorisms, etc.)

Dictionary of Argentinean slang

Letters

Diaries

Works written in collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges

Dos fantasías memorables and Un modelo para la muerte were originally published in private printings of only 300 copies. The first commercial printings were published in 1970.

Works written in collaboration with Silvina Ocampo

Screenplays written in collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges

References

  1. ↑ Thomas Beltzer, Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation .

External links

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About The Invention of Morel