What is Reality?



The Invention of Morel
By Adolfo Bioy Casares


The Invention of Morel is a 1940 novella by Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. It was supposedly inspired by his fascination with the silent film actress Louise Brooks, and so there's a beautiful photo of her on the cover of this new edition. Sort of strange, though. She's not mentioned in the text and now that I think of it, it was probably pretty weird to be still obsessed with a silent film star in 1940, when the talkies had been around for 12 years or more.

I can't say I really liked the book, but it was interesting. It tells the story of a criminal who flees to what he thinks is an uninhabited island, only to run across a party of people who also appear to be staying on the island. He falls in love with one of the women, but she takes no notice of him. Eventually, he discovers that these people aren't here at all -- that he is seeing them in a kind of projected medium, the invention of Morel, one of the guests.

To modern audiences, the twist is not all that shocking. We are accustomed to documenting our lives through video, and there has been a glut of similar (to use Chuck Klosterman's lame phrase) "what is reality?" movies in the past 15 years -- you know, "The Matrix," "Existenz," "Vanilla Sky," "Total Recall." But it's pretty cool to realize that writers were thinking 65 years ago about how media can be confused with reality. And the illustrations are great.