A short life of the author
Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) was born on 15 September 1914 in Buenos Aires into a wealthy family. He met Jorge Luis Borges in 1932, beginning one of the most important literary friendships of the twentieth century. They collaborated on numerous works under joint pseudonyms (H. Bustos Domecq, B. Suárez Lynch) and co-edited an influential anthology of fantastic literature.
Life and Career
The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel, 1940) — about a fugitive who arrives on a seemingly deserted island and discovers a group of people who appear and disappear according to an inexplicable pattern — is his masterpiece. Borges wrote the prologue, calling it a novel “whose plot I shall not attempt to summarise, for fear of spoiling its elegant and surprising denouement.” The novel’s exploration of simulation, projection, and the relationship between image and reality anticipates virtual reality and has been cited as an influence on the television series Lost.
A Plan for Escape (1945), The Dream of Heroes (1954), Diary of the War of the Pig (1969), and Asleep in the Sun (1973) are all distinguished novels that combine fantastic premises with precise, elegant prose.
Major Works and Themes
Bioy Casares wrote about love, perception, and the unreliability of reality. His fiction is formally disciplined — closer to the detective story in its construction than to the sprawling Latin American novel — and philosophically ambitious. Where Borges’s fiction tends toward the cerebral and the abstract, Bioy Casares’s is more sensual and emotionally engaged.
Key Works
- The Invention of Morel (1940)
- The Dream of Heroes (1954)
- Diary of the War of the Pig (1969)
Collecting Bioy Casares
Argentine first editions (Losada, Emecé) are the primary collected form. English translations — The Invention of Morel (1964, NYRB Classics reissue is the most available) — are also collected. Bioy Casares died in 1999.