Has the narrator, weakened by hunger and illness, invented Morel and his retinue, or is Morel running an eerie experiment with all of them? (The influence of the ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ is strong here) The ambiguity of the title becomes ever more apparent.ADOLFO BIOY CASARES (1914-1999) was born in BuenosAires, the child of wealthy parents. But strange, illogical things keep happening: doors that will suddenly not open anymore, but later on do people appearing and disappearing mysteriously and silently fragments of conversation being repeated verbatim. Throughout the story, we get the sense that we are caught in someone’s fever-dream, although the narrator assures us that these visitors are not hallucinations. Then he discovers that she is also being wooed by ‘an ugly bearded tennis player’ called Morel and he cannot stop himself eavesdropping on their conversation. But when he attempts to talk to her, he either stumbles over his own ineptitude or else she simply ignores him. He becomes obsessed with this woman and tries to woo her with an offering of a garden of dead, picked flowers (yes, really!). The narrator is terrified that they might stumble upon him and call the police, yet he cannot stop himself observing them from a distance, especially a dark-haired woman who sits every evening on the rocks to admire the sunset.
It all feels very Evelyn Waugh at this point.
Then, all of a sudden, the island is ‘invaded’ by a group of people intent on partying, dancing, playing ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘Valencia’ on their phonograph, playing tennis, lounging around and chatting. However, the island seems to be decaying: prone to unpredictable tides and flooding, the marshlands on the south side of the island seem to be taking over, the trees are diseased and the food stores in the ‘museum’ (which feels more like a hotel or a sanatorium) have long since run out. Nevertheless, the narrator is desperate enough to seek refuge there. He was told about this island by an Italian rugseller in Calcutta: an uninhabited island where ‘around 1924 a group of white men built a museum, a chapel and a swimming pool’, but anyone who attempts to live there is said to fall prey to a fatal disease that attacks the outside of the body first and then works its way inward. It could hardly get more remote than the island where the narrator lives, in an attempt to flee justice for a crime that he never quite describes. I wonder if the outbreak of war caused many writers to feel that reality was too uncomfortable to deal with and that they should focus either on escapism or, if they wanted to address any social issues, they should write them ‘aslant’. Both Octavio Paz and Borges described this as a perfect novel, but it is incredibly difficult to describe or define – and fits in perfectly with two other novels published in 1940 that I have on my list.
0 kommentar(er)
