Coming Clean About LOSTSeveral years ago I was induced by my grandchildren to watch seven seasons’ worth of the television series LOST during summer holidays. Filmed in Hawaii from 2004 to 2010, the series recounted the increasingly strange existence of the survivors of a trans-Pacific flight on an apparently uncharted, and possibly uncharitable, island. Often tedious, always unexpected, the tale, I decided, was either an invention beyond my abilities to appreciate, or it was utter nonsense, with no overall plot or plan for an ending. Turns out it was a bit of both.Although I have read nothing to confirm this conclusion, it is entirely clear to me that LOST is merely a derivative version of Bioy Casares novella, The Invention of Morel.
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- The Invention Of Morel Summary
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At least three versions of the 1949 the book had been made into films during the 1960's and 70's. These were explicitly credited to Bioy Casares. But as far as I am aware there is no mention of him as the inspiration for the LOST series. Yet the substance of his book is identical to that of the series, with a few twists thrown into the series reflecting more modern tastes and technologies. Here are my main points of comparison:1.Both the series and the book take place on a remote island which is inaccessible by normal means. This is explained in the book as due to a reef and an illness, but not in the series which relies on unexplained physical phenomena. The precise means of entry and exit from the island remains a mystery in both.2.Bioy has a single protagonist who arrives on the island as a fugitive from justice for some indeterminate crime for which he feels both guilt and shame.
In LOST this transforms into a plane-load of survivors most of whom are also fugitives, either from the law or from intolerable social conditions. All the main characters feel guilt and shame and demonstrate the same sort of paranoia as Bioy's.3.There is architectural evidence on the islands in both the book and the series of a previous habitation, modern buildings of unknown purpose, which have been abandoned but left in serviceable condition.4.Within these structures are found various sophisticated technologies of indeterminate function that are powered by a natural but novel source of tremendous energy. In the series this source is an intense magnetic field, in the book it is tidal forces.5.These technologies, it is eventually revealed, both allow time travel within the island and provide immortality to its inhabitants. There are relatively minor differences in the series and the book having mainly to do with the level of contemporary technological development reached in each case.6.The characters in the series mirror those in the book. LOSTS's Ben Linus is the same Californian-esque cult leader as Morel. Bioy's protagonist and his 'female lead', Faustine are the series Jack Shepherd and his sometime enamorata Juliet, this latter being the focus of rivalry by the male characters in both.7.Several other tropes and devices from Bioy are used repeatedly in the series: half-heard conversations, dream-like sequences, and so on. Others are scarcely concealed variants.
For example, in Bioy, trees on the island die before maturity; in the series, it is infants who die.The parts of the television series which were comprehensible to me were precisely those written by Bioy. I appreciated them as creative and innovative even 60 years later.
The rest was indeed junk. And yet not a mention of the real source by the tv producers. ‘ I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.’How often we feel like an island, alone in a world and beleaguered by the crashing waves of change, responsibility and heartache eroding our soil. Adolfo Bioy Casares presents us a chilling and empathetic tale of love and loneliness, molding the ‘diary of a man stranded on an island’ literary trope into a fantastical and exciting exploration into the human heart. While the sci-fi elements are engaging and intriguing, it is the beat of the human heart drumming out a rhythm of angst and anxiety that takes center stage and pulls the fantasy elements along while making them still feel fresh decades later.
The Invention Of Morel Pdf Free Online
The sting of unrequited love and the human desire to cheat death form a beautiful landscape for discussions of immortality and escape through Bioy Casares deft churning of plot and revelation.The diary writer of The Invention of Morel is both literally, emotionally and psychologically stranded on an island. Escaping a lifetime sentence for an unmentioned crime, he seeks refuge on an island feared for its legends of death and disease amongst what seems like an abandoned vacation resort. The shadowy life sentence hangs over his every move, and when strangers suddenly populate the island, he fears it is an elaborate plot to bring him to justice.
The refusal to even hint at his crimes is one of the many mysteries of the novella that Bioy Casares employs to keep the screw of tension turned tight and add a veil of unreliability to the story—for which is benefits and adds color to an otherwise drab plot¹.‘ It is useless to try to keep the whole body alive.’The story of the Invention is fascinating, but it is not the invention but the morality within it’s creation that is most satisfying. This is a story of love, of being denied love and of desiring to capture the feeling of love for all eternity. Death is the great fear of mortality, and Bioy Casares offers a wild window into attempts to prove the notion that love conquers all, even death in this case. Inspired by a fixation with actress Louise Brooks, Invention explores the depths and depravity of unrequited love, focusing in on the infatuation one can feel for a character in a film or novel. In fits of infatuation, one may act in ways that seems irrational or uncharacteristic from the outside, and the narrator here is a perfect demonstration of the frustration and desperation of a one-sided love affair, even if one is in love with the idea of a person rather than the actual person. This calls to mind the assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr.
In an attempt to get the attention of and impress actress Jodie Foster. The technique of the diary is engaging as it allows the reader to occupy the writer’s headspace, leading towards an empathetic validation of his actions instead of a more cold and removed perspective.The slow unveiling of the plot under intense tones of stress is one of Inventions greatest strengths. This book is difficult to set down as the intensity of the mystery rages at a slow boil. Events take shape like the silhouettes of strangers sauntering out of a mist, and much is left unseen to trouble the reader like icebergs on a dark night at sea. While we are never told of the crime, there is an illuminating passage during the climactic final pages that chronicles the political struggles of the narrators homeland, slyly incorporating a message of feeling isolated by your own country during times of political strife.
This seems in keeping with the political undertones of Latin American literature and adds an anchor to history for an otherwise weightless novella.Jorge Luis Borges championed Invention of Morel as a ‘perfect’ novel, a claim sure to raise a few critical eyebrows. Undeniably, the story could have easily been expanded upon and encompassed the reader in a vaster field of themes and insights into the moral implications of the novel; luckily we have the early seasons of LOST to build a world on the thin strands of ideas in this novel. Morel manages to be nearly perfect² for what it is as a novella—to have cut it to a short story would cheapen it and I suspect expanding on it would give a bloated feel—and strikes a sharp blow of singular emotive power by focusing on the pains of impossible love and letting the vast possibilities of the fantastic sci-fi backdrop serve mostly as a conduit for the discussions of solitude in life and love. There is a wider story and plot that could easily be taken to extraordinary places by authors intent more on the impressiveness of plot, but caressing the human heart behind this tale seems a more valuable experience. There is a high price for immortality, and what better to live on for eternity than the feelings of love. For all intensive purposes, Bioy Casares The Invention of Morel lives up to the challenge of immortality and has earned its keep among reissues and Latin American canonization.4/5‘ 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).’¹ Octavio Paz praised the novella as a world where ‘ not only do we traverse a realm of shadows, we ourselves are shadows’.
Everything is shadowy and unsure in the anxious tension that drives Invention. The Editor character that appears in the footnotes adds a further layer to toy with the ideas of authenticity though their role is primarily to highlight inconsistencies and mistakes. Another interesting aspect of the Editor character is that it assumes the document has been found and that there is a whole further story of discovery to be had out of sight from the reader; there is another chapter to the Invention that we will never know and this heightens the joy.² One minor annoyance with the novel is the large sections of explanation exposition at the end of the book. It works, as it takes the form of the diary writer attempting to organize his own thoughts and theories on his circumstances, yet rather reeks of betraying the ‘show don’t tell’ constructs of literature that I tend to prefer. A lean, somewhat remarkable little thing. The much ballyhooed connection with Last Year at Marienbad is fascinating - I never would have thought of it but it's dead on.
The Invention Of Morel Summary
I don't really know how to explain what this is without spoiling it, but it's an admirable piece of surrealism/sci-fi that stands out for its meticulousness. Every aspect is painstakingly explained (and illustrated!) and what results is a totally logical book. It's fun to try to figure out what is happening alongside the narrator - my favorite section comes when he lays out every possible explanation for the strange events - and I found Casares's disinterest in exposition commendable. The thing that's actually happening is a fairly brilliant literary invention, and the ending is massively on-point. Some nice moments of meta-fiction are sprinkled through, and I totally dug the flower garden sequence (you'll see).What's weird, really weird, is despite all this, it's too long.
You'll get frustrated with the narrator for not figuring it out sooner. And there are these strange little loops in it that make it read a little too stream-of-consciousnessy (the introduction claims that this is a move away from that particular surrealist trend - I'd argue that some tendrils remain). I see why Borges liked it, but it doesn't remind me of his writing at all.
The Invention of Morel was adjudged a perfect work by Jorge Luis Borges, the author’s mentor/friend/frequent collaborator. Anybody familiar with the essays and short fiction of Borges can appreciate what it means for one of the great masters of world literature to make such a pronouncement. Perhaps Borges’ appraisal reflects, in part, how Adolfo Bioy Casares shares much of his own aesthetic and literary sensibilities since, after all, they collaborated on twelve books.More specifically, here are some obvious similarities between the writing of the two authors:. The Invention of Morel is only one hundred pages, not too much longer than a number of Borges’s longer tales. Similar to stories like The Circular Ruin, The Aleph and many other Borges tales, The Invention of Morel deals with multiple levels of so called reality. The language and writing is elegant. Bloy Casares' short novel is akin to Borges' writing in Doctor Brodie’s Report and The Book of Sand, where Borges let go of his more ornate, baroque style.For the purpose of this review, I will take a specific focus: the relationship between the novel and the author’s and our own experience of film and television.The 1920s were the heyday of silent films.
The first commercially successful sound film, The Jazz Singer, was released in 1929. Black and White 1940s TV was as raw as raw can be – just look at those 1949 TV shows on You Tube.
In 1940, the year of publication for The Invention of Morel, ideas about what would become TV where 'in the air'; what really had a grip on people’s imagination in the 1920s and 1930s was film, first silent film then film with sound.So, one can imagine a sensitive, imaginative literary artist like Adolfo Bioy Casares (born 1914) experiencing silent film in the 1920s as a boy and then sound films as a teenager and young man. One thing that makes The Invention of Morel so compelling is just how much of what the narrator and others in the novel experience is parallel to a world saturated with films and TV.Below are a number of quotes from the novel coupled with my reflections:“They are at the top of the hill, while I am far below.
From here they look like a race of giants.” (page 12) - Darn, if this wasn’t my exact experience when I went to my first movie. I was so overwhelmed by the race of giants ‘up there’ on the screen, I fled from the theater minutes after the movie started.“I saw the same room duplicated eight times in eight directions as if it were reflected in mirror.” (page 18) - Again, darn. I recall my almost disbelief when, as a kid, I saw the same image repeated a dozen times when I first saw all those TVs turned to the same station in a department store. There was something freaky about the exact movement and image repeated on all those sets.“I went back to see her the next afternoon, and the next. She was there, and her presence began to take on the quality of a miracle.” (page 25) - How many teenagers, young men and women and even older adults have fallen in love with a movie star and go back to the movies to see their loved one the next night and the next?“Words and movements of Faustine and the bearded man coincided with those of a week ago. The atrocious eternal return.” (page 41) - In a way, isn’t that the world of movies – the same exact people doing exactly the same thing night after night up there on the screen.
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Live theater doesn't even come close to the movie’s eternal return.“Horrified by Faustine, who was so close to me, actually might be on another planet.” (page 53) - How many men and women who have fallen in love with a star in a film or a TV show where they are so close they can press their hands against the star’s face (the TV screen) come to realize their emotions and feelings are for a being a universe away, far beyond their actual touch?““Tea for Two” and “Valencia” persisted until after dawn.” (page 62) - Most appropriate! Films and TV thrive on easy-to-remember songs and jingles.“I began to search for waves and vibrations that had previously been unattainable, to devise instruments to receive and transmit them.” (page 69). It is as if the author tuned into the collective unconscious desire in 1940 to expand film in different ways, one way being what would become TV.“ I was certain that my images of persons would lack consciousness of themselves (like the characters in a motion picture).” (page 70) - This is part of a nearly four pages of Morel's internal dialogue. There is a lot here.
One reflection: how many people have sacrificed their flesh-and-blood existential reality to make it as a star up there on the silver screen? What happens to the soul of the people in a city like Los Angeles, for example, when the city is taken over by an entire industry dedicated to producing films and shows populated by stars?I recall a quote from the main character in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he goes into a roadside diner and can’t get the waitress’s attention because she is watching TV. He says, “I don’t exist since I’m not on TV.”Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999).
Praise'The masterpiece among Bioy Casares’ short, intense novels is The Invention of Morel, a book that won raves from Borges (who placed it alongside Franz Kafka’s The Trial), was called 'perfect' by Octavio Paz, and inspired one of French cinema’s most infamous moviesf, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Though it was published in 1940, the book’s continuing relevance was recently proven when it was featured on Lost — a cameo many viewers perceive as a key to that TV show’s plot. But that doesn’t mean this is a tough tract unfit for quality beach time Just know that Morel is a poetic evocation of the experience of love, an inquiry into how we know one another, and a still-relevant examination of how technology has changed our relationship with reality.
It’s also a great read — one you’ll be pressing into the hands of your fellow beach-goers.'