Adolfo Bioy Casares

[Stewart]

Adolfo Bioy Casares (September 15, 1914 - March 8, 1999) was an Argentine fiction writer.

Bioy Casares was born in Buenos Aires, the grandson of a wealthy landowner and dairy processor. His parents were keen alphabet enthusiasts, which explains their choice of his initials "ABC". He wrote his first story (Iris y Margarita) at the age of 11. He was a friend and frequent collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges and wrote many stories with him under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq.

Bioy and Borges were introduced in 1932 by Victoria Ocampo, whose sister, Silvina Ocampo, Bioy Casares was to marry in 1940. In 1954 they adopted Bioy’s daughter with another woman; Marta Bioy Ocampo (1954-94) was killed in an automobile accident just three weeks after Silvina Ocampo’s death, leaving two children. The estate of Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares was awarded by a Buenos Aires court to yet another love child of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Fabián Bioy, shortly before Fabián Bioy died, aged 40, in February 2006.

He won several awards, including the Gran Premio de Honor of SADE (the Argentine Society of Writers, 1975), the French Légion d'honneur (1981), the title of Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires (1986), and the Premio Miguel de Cervantes (awarded to him in 1991 in Alcalá de Henares).

Adolfo Bioy Casares is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires. In 2006 Ediciones Destino published a book of Bioy's diary entries on Borges, numbering 1663 pages of anecdotes, witicisms and observations.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

• La invención de Morel (1940) [Eng: The Invention Of Morel]
• Plan de evasión (1945) [Eng: A Plan For Escape]
• El sueño de los héroes (1954) [Eng: Dream For Heroes]
• Diario de la guerra del cerdo (1969) [Eng: Diary Of The War Of The Pig]
• Dormir al Sol (1973) [Eng: Asleep In The Sun]
• La aventura de un fotógrafo en La Plata (1985) [Eng: The Adventures Of A Photographer In La Plata]
• Un campeón desparejo (1993) [Eng: An Uneven Champion]

RELATED THREADS

• The Invention Of Morel
• A Plan For Escape
  

RELATED LINKS

• Bioy reknown around the world
• Adolfo Bioy Casares on IMDB.com

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[Heteronym]

An extraordinary writer.

I read his two first novels in glee. He recovered the island narrative subgenre that has existed in fantasy for centuries and made something fresh out of it. The Invention of Morel is a heartbreaking story of doomed love and A Plan for Escape is just terrifying in the oppressive atmosphere it creates.

Although I wouldn't mind reading more novels of mysterious islands by Casares, I'm glad he moved on to different settings. In recent years Casares translations have bloomed in Portugal and currently five novels and one short-story collection are available. I have Asleep in the Sun on the shelf but I think reading his novels chronologically will be more interesting.

[Stewart]

Asleep In The Sun is the other one with The Invention Of Morel, that seems to be available in English, thanks to NYRB Classics. I've not bought it yet but the cover is so strange that I want to jump into it one day without even reading the blurb:

[nnyhav]

But there's also H. Bustos Domecq ... (also, I've read what short stories of his have been Englished)

The new Quarterly Conversation has Scott Esposito's essay, Latin America's Kafka, on Bioy Casares:

After Borges, Bioy considered his greatest literary influence to be Franz Kafka. (His follow-up to Morel, Escape Plan, contains significant nods to Kafka’s “The Penal Colony” and The Castle.) Although tuberculosis precluded Kafka from ever reading Borges or Bioy, if he had he might have returned some of the praise that the two Argentines heaped onto the Czech. In interviews, Bioy stated his great admiration for Kafka’s “arguments,” which he found laced into his plots; Bioy even went so far as to declare that Kafka’s arguments invented a genre of their own. Borges too made no secret of his great admiration for Kafka. He wrote that “Kafka was the first among this century’s writers,” and then went on to explain his debt to him: “I have written stories in which I tried with great ambition but little success to be Kafka. There is one titled ‘The Library of Babel’ and others that were exercises in trying to be Kafka.”

[Heteronym]

I wouldn't have made the connection with G.K. Chesterton, but it does make a lot of sense now, with his mildly surreal mysteries like The Man Who Was Thursday.

A Plan for Escape does read like a Kafka story, it's the most oppressive novel I've ever read, there's an ongoing sense of dread throughout the narrative that leaves the mind excited for a long time.