It is obviously not easy for a creative and highly successful person to live in the shadow of an even more creative and successful person all his life.. This is exactly what happened to Adolfo Bioy Casares, whose autobiography in almost any source begins with the fact that he was a friend and for a long time - co-author of Jorge Luis Borges. Literary scholars call them the pillars of Argentine and, more broadly, Latin American literature. But for the Ukrainian reader, acquaintance with Casares is just beginning, unless, of course, the publishing and translation industry slows down.
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Born into a wealthy metropolitan family, the future writer Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999, Buenos Aires) was deprived of the need to earn a living, so he devoted himself to permanent self-education, regularly enrolling in and leaving the humanities faculties of the country's main university. At the same time, he trained in writing, writing his first detective story either at 14, or, according to other sources, at 11 years old.
In the 1930s, he met the sisters Victoria and Silvina Ocampo, versatile writers, the eldest of whom became famous, rather, for her feminist endeavors (became, in particular, the first Argentinean woman to hold a driver’s license), and the youngest for her fantastic works, entering the host of Argentine writing. Victoria introduced the young Casares to the older and already famous Borges, with whom they became best friends and sometimes co-authors.
The younger sister, Silvina, became Casares’ wife in 1940. And in the same year he published his most famous work - a small novel in volume and very non-trivial in meaning, “The Invention of Morel”. At a time when television was just beginning its triumphal path, the author convincingly described a device that creates holographic images that, without touch, cannot be distinguished from real ones (now, of course, this would be called virtual reality). The hero of the novel, a failed writer, pursued by the police, settles on a small island and at first does not even realize that he is not following real people from a luxurious villa, but their copies....
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Over time, the novel became such a success that it was filmed twice (in 1967 by the French, in 1974 by the Italians). In addition, film experts have a version that the novel was taken as the basis (but completely reworked) of Alan Robbe-Grieux’s complex plot film “Last Year in Marienbad” (1961). Science fiction researchers find parallels between The Invention of Morel and Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. And fans of the once very popular series “Lost”, exploring its Easter eggs, can see how this novel by Casares is read in one of the episodes by the key character of the mysterious island game.
“I discussed with the author all the details of his novel, re-read it more than once or twice. I think it would not be inaccurate or an exaggeration to call this work perfect,” Luis Borges said about the book in his article in 1980. This article was published in 1991 in the magazine “Vsesvit”, as if apologizing to readers for the absence of the novel itself: “Due to the very large volume of this work [the editors] do not have the opportunity to publish it on their pages and therefore are trying to fill this “blank spot” at least in this way.”. Considering that “The Invention of Morel” is the most translated work of Casares into different languages \u200b\u200bof the world, we can only hope that one day Ukrainian readers will see it.
Two years after Morel, in 1942, the book of the unknown Honorio Bustos Domecq, Six Puzzles for Don Isidro Parodi, was published on the Argentine market.. This is a collection of parodies of tabloid detective stories (which is directly hinted at by the name of the main character, a prisoner in one of the Buenos Aires prisons and at the same time an investigator of a number of crimes). The most important thing remains behind the scenes - this is the first joint work of Casares and Borges, who decided to escape from serious literature and joke. They wrote a convincing biography of the fictional author, and he began to become so popular that he even gained followers. However, the most successful of them, a certain Benito Suarez Lynch with the popular novel “A Model of Murder,” turned out to be the same hoax of the duo of Casares and Borges. The inventor of “Morel’s invention” with his hologram people began to populate the literary world with virtual characters. In 2017, “Six Puzzles...” was published in Ukrainian by the musician and part-time Spanish philologist Solomiya Chubai..
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Casares develops the theme of illusion, begun by “The Invention of Morel,” in the novel “The Dream of Heroes” (1954), which some critics consider the best in the author’s legacy. The main character tries in vain to remember the events of a high-profile carnival in the Argentine capital of the late 1920s. Gradually, this desire takes the form of obsession and leads to mystical events with a tragic ending.. A film was made based on the novel in 1997 in the author’s homeland..
Casares' stories are no less interesting - mostly with a fantastic basis. For example, the story “On the Shape of the World”, where the main character accidentally finds himself drawn into a smuggling scam using the “wormhole” in space, beloved by many science fiction writers, through which you can easily travel a considerable distance to neighboring Uruguay, where the government has banned all travel.. But instead, a random smuggler starts an affair in a neighboring country. (It is worth noting that the author himself was a lover of numerous novels on the side, to the point that during one of them he acquired a daughter, whom the writer’s wife accepted into the family.
A landmark novel is Casares’s novel “Diary of a War with Pigs” (“Old Lev’s Vidavnitstvo”, 2018, translated by Anna Vovchenko). Written in 1969, the dystopia immerses the reader in the same Buenos Aires, where youth gangs decide to exterminate the entire elderly population.
Under the influence of youth riots in 1968, literary young Argentines brand all middle-aged pigs, blaming them for all sins and problems, and begin to beat old people to death on the streets of the capital. The novel does not contain the expected hard action; on the contrary, the events of just a few days of summer unfold slowly, they are not rich in plots, like the very lives of elderly people, squeezed by economic difficulties. In 1975, the work was filmed by Argentine filmmakers under the title “War of the Pigs.”.
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