Adolfo Bioy Casares

Adolfo Bioy Casares (Buenos Aires, September 15, 1914-Ib., March 8, 1999) was an Argentine writer, considered one of the most important authors of his country and of the literature in Spanish, being translated into more than sixteen languages and awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1990.

He collaborated on several occasions with Jorge Luis Borges under different pseudonyms, and to a lesser extent with his own wife, the writer Silvina Ocampo. The Invention of Morel (1940), The Dream of Heroes (1954) and Sleep in the Sun (1973).

Biography

Early Years

He was born on September 15, 1914 in Buenos Aires, the only son of Adolfo Bioy Domecq and Marta Ignacia Casares Lynch, in the Recoleta neighborhood, traditionally inhabited by patrician or upper-class families, and where most of the of their life. According to the genealogist Narciso Binayán Carmona, he was a descendant of the Spanish conquistador, explorer, and colonizer Domingo Martínez de Irala (1509-1556); His ancestors had a remote Guarani mestizo origin, which he shared with many heroes of the time of Independence and with great Paraguayan and Argentine characters.Likewise, his maternal grandfather Vicente Casares was the founder of La Martona, the first company Argentine dairy.

Like most of the children of aristocratic families of the time, he had a polyglot education since he was a child, becoming fluent in English and French, as well as Spanish. During his childhood he spent periods between two ranches owned by his family, Rincón Viejo in the town of Pardo and San Martín in Vicente Casares (a town named in homage to his grandfather), of which Bioy especially preferred the first, to which he would return frequently to devote himself to writing.

His literary vocation was awakened early, thanks to the family library and his father's encouragement, writing his first story, Iris y Margarita, at the age of eleven, to impress a cousin of the one he was in love with. He completed his secondary studies at the Instituto Libre de Segunda Enseñanza of the University of Buenos Aires, after which he began and abandoned the careers of Law, Philosophy and Letters. Disenchanted with the university experience, and to prevent his intention to be a writer from being taken as an excuse for doing nothing, he asked his parents to send him to manage Rincón Viejo, Pardo's ranch, and Although his work as an administrator was a failure, he took the opportunity to read and write. Thanks to his family's comfortable economic position, he was able to dedicate himself exclusively to literature from his youth, while staying away from the literary milieu of his time. Thus, in 1929 Bioy published his first book, Prologue , in an edition paid for and corrected by his father. Over the following years, Bioy would publish another five books (17 shots against the future, Chaos, The new storm, The homemade statue and Luis Greve, dead) which he later repudiated, forbidding their reissue and describing them as "horrible".

Bioy Casares, together with Victoria Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges at the rambla Casino de Mar del Plata in 1935.

Wanting for him to make contact with the literary environment, Bioy's mother encouraged him to attend the meetings that Victoria Ocampo organized in Villa Ocampo, her family's house located in the ravines of San Isidro, where the writer used to receive international figures of culture. It was during one of these meetings that in 1932 Bioy met Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he would become a close friend and collaborator. According to his testimony, Borges and he had separated from the rest of the people, so Ocampo, annoyed by their attitude, approached them and told them "don't be crap, take care of the guest", causing Borges' anger and withdrawal. of both from the meeting. On the return trip to the city, a friendship was sealed that would last until Borges's death in 1986, and which gave rise to one of the most famous duos in literature, collaborating on several works, from short stories (Six problems for Don Isidro Parodi, Two memorable fantasies, A model for death), to film scripts (Los orilleros, The paradise of believers, Invasion) to anthologies (Anthology of fantastic literature, Short and Extraordinary Stories), often publishing under the pseudonyms Honorio Bustos Domecq and Benito Suárez Lynch.

That same year he also met Silvina Ocampo, Victoria's sister, also a writer and painter, who became his partner for more than six decades. The relationship between the two was marked from the beginning by breaking conventions of their time and their class, from the age difference (Silvina was eleven years older) and the fact that they lived together for eight years without being married, to Bioy's habit of openly maintaining relationships with other women. Opinions Among scholars and biographers on how Ocampo took her husband's infidelities differ, ranging from those who maintain that she suffered them in silence to those who say that she kept lovers on her own. In this regard, her executor Ernesto Montequín rejects her victimizing vision: «That puts her in a place of disability. The relationship with Bioy was very complex; she had a fairly full love life (...) Her relationship with Bioy could make her suffer, but it also inspired her.” Despite everything, they stayed together until Silvina's death.

Literary career

A few months after marrying Silvina at the insistence of his father, in 1940 Bioy published La invención de Morel, a novel that marks the beginning of his literary maturity and with which the author himself considered which begins his work. The novel incorporates science fiction elements that, however, are not explained until the end, and is structured as the diary of a fugitive who arrives on an island that he thought was deserted until he discovered that it appears to be inhabited. With a prologue by Borges, whom it is also dedicated, the work was widely accepted, receiving the First Municipal Prize for Literature the following year, and even today it is Bioy's most famous work, converted into a reading text in secondary schools. At that time he began his collaborations with Borges and his wife, with the publication of the stories of Six problems for don Isidro Parodi (1942) and two anthologies, Anthology of fantastic literature (1940) and Antología poetica argentina (1941), of which the first would become a reference work of the genre.

In 1945 his next novel appeared, Escape Plan, set in the penal colony of Devil's Island in French Guiana. This work continues and deepens the theme of science fiction already explored in The Invention of Morel, since the text constantly alludes to Goethe's theory of colors and William James's ideas on perception. of reality. Praised by Ernesto Sabato, the work did not, however, have the same critical reception as its predecessor. Three years later La plot celeste appeared, bringing together six short stories and novels, among which "In memory of Paulina", "The celestial plot" and "The perjury of the snow".

During the years of Peronism, of which Bioy was a fervent opponent like most of his friends and family, the writer turned to reading and writing detective and fantastic stories and novels, as well as signing books in collaboration. Thus, between 1945 and 1955, together with Borges, he directed the collection "El sevento círculo" for the Emecé publishing house, which published translations of the best detective novels in the English language; At the same time, they published Two memorable fantasies and A model for death, to which should be added the story "The Monster Party", a fierce anti-Peronist parody that appeared in print in Uruguay and the only explicitly political text that he published. At that time, he also published his only work written by him together with Silvina Ocampo, the detective novel Los que aman, odian .

It was not until 1954 that his next book appeared, The Dream of Heroes, with which he inaugurated a new period in his work, moving away from the "reasoned fantasies" and the island settings of his two previous novels, although without abandoning his permanent obsessions such as love, women and games with time and space. Written between 1947 and 1952, and set in Buenos Aires, the novel narrates the adventures of Emilio Gauna to recover a lost memory during a carnival dawn, after three days of caravanning with his friends. It is considered by several authors as the best Bioy's novel, and the one that led to the most critical analysis after The Invention of Morel. On July 8 of that year, his daughter Marta was born, the result of Bioy's relationship with one of his lovers, but that she was adopted and raised by Silvina. Shortly after, the Bioys settled on the fifth floor of the Posadas 1650 building, owned by the Ocampo family, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

In the following years, Bioy turned especially to short stories, with the volumes Prodigious Story (1956), Garland with Loves (1959), which includes aphorisms, short stories and some poems, El lado de la sombra (1962) and El gran serafin (1967), in which he alternated between fantastic tales and others with love themes; at the same time, during this time he became an amateur photographer, a facet that was discovered only in recent years. On August 15, 1963, his second son, Fabián, was born, also from an extramarital affair, with whom he would contact as an adult.

He returned to the novel in 1969 with Diario de la guerra del pordo, in which he narrates the attempts of a retiree to avoid being a victim of groups of young people who suddenly and without adults explanations begin to chase, attack and kill the elderly. Often read in a political key, as Bioy's response to the countercultural movements of the decade, or as a work in which the author returns to his well-known obsession with fear of the passage of time and the decay of the body, it has been however, the novel that generated less interest among critics. It was adapted to the cinema in 1975 by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, with the title The War of the Pig.

After the publication of two anthologies, Love Stories and Fantastic Stories, which included three hitherto unpublished short stories, in 1973 Sleep in the Sun appeared i>, in which he returns to his usual fantastic plots. Written in the form of a long "report" of the protagonist, Lucio Bordenave, addressed to a friend, Felix Ramos, the novel narrates how the narrator's wife disappears after being admitted to a "Frenopathic Institute", and how he is convinced that the soul of his wife was transferred to the body of a dog. Bioy declared that it was his favorite novel that he had written, and like the previous one, it was made into a film in 2012 by Alejandro Chomski. Five years later he published another book of short stories, The Women's Hero, where he included the three unpublished short stories published in Love Stories and Fantastic Stories.

Last years

Bioy Casares tomb. Cemetery of the Recoleta, Buenos Aires.

In 1985 he published The adventure of a photographer in La Plata, a novel with a Kafkaesque atmosphere that has been read as an allegory of those who disappeared during the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983, during which Bioy Casares came to witness an extrajudicial execution in the street, after which he published the volume of short stories Historias desaforadas . Around those years, the figure of Bioy began to gain increasing international recognition, after his discovery in Spain and the publication of several books in that country. A year later he was declared an Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires, and in 1990 he received two important awards in recognition of his entire career: the Alfonso Reyes Award and the Cervantes Award, the highest award for Castilian letters.

However, at the same time that he achieved international consecration, in his private life he suffered a series of accidents and losses that affected him profoundly: Borges's death in 1986 and a double hip fracture in 1992, were added the almost simultaneous deaths of Silvina Ocampo, by then already very affected by Alzheimer's that had her bedridden for the last three years, and her daughter Marta, victim of a car accident, between December 1993 and January 1994. She endured the mourning traveling and accompanied by a group of collaborators and assistants, such as his nurse, Lidia Benítez, and his employee, Jovita Iglesias; as well as a friend and former lover of hers, with whom she resumed contact in her last years, Cristina Castro Cranwell. At that time, she also began to get closer to her son Fabián, whom she officially recognized in 1998, and saw her grandson Florencio more often, who accompanied him in his later years.

During this period, he still managed to publish some fiction books, such as the short novels An Uneven Champion (1993) and From One World to Another (1998) and the storybooks A Russian doll (1991) and A modest magic (1997); Likewise, he published a series of autobiographical books, based on selections from his personal papers, such as his Memoirs, the epistolary En viaje (1967) and the commomplace-book Other people's gardens, which includes quotes, fragments, poems and other unclassifiable texts. However, the reception of these texts was rather lukewarm, with critics accusing an exhausted repetition of topics already covered in the former and a lightness that borders on laziness or disinterest in the latter.

After a series of hospitalizations due to a progressive deterioration of his health, Bioy Casares died on March 8, 1999, at the age of 84. At the express request of the writer, who did not want to be veiled, only a brief religious service in the chapel of the Recoleta Cemetery before burying his remains in the family vault. Until shortly before his death, he worked on selecting and correcting the pages of his diaries (which he carried out for half a century) with the help of the scholar Daniel Martino. After the publication of a first selection in 2001, Descanso de caminantes, in 2006 Borges was finally published, a volume of almost one thousand seven hundred pages in which he collects all notes dedicated to your friend, as well as their conversations. The publication of the book aroused controversy among readers and critics, who were divided between those who praised the publication as a literary event, and those who considered that Bioy seemed to want to damage Borges's image by publishing his intimate opinions. More recently, compiled and edited by Daniel Martino, in 2021 Wilcock was published, dedicated to the writer Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, with whom Bioy was also a friend.

Themes and style

Bioy Casares in 1941.

Bioy Casares' style has been defined as refined, neat and classic, with a clear influence from Borges at first, although over time he developed resources that distinguish him from the author of El Aleph. Leaving aside his early stage (1929 - 1937), rejected by himself and which critics consider a period of maturation in which a notable influence of symbolism and surrealism predominates, at least two moments in his career can be distinguished production:

• Between 1940 and 1953, his works are characterized by the predominance of the plot and the development of a thoroughly armed intrigue, in which a fantastic fact occurs that finds its explanation at the end of the story. The first two novels of the author enter this stage, The invention of Morel and Evasion planand his book of stories The celestial plot.

• Starting in 1954, and without breaking with the basic elements of his narrative universe, Bioy departs from the “reasonable ghosts” of Bourgean influence, and begins to introduce a certain ironic distance in the use of typical procedures of the fantastic genre and the police, at the same time that accentuates the ribumbrist element, both in the characterization of environments and characters as well as in the use of oral language and a flatter style, Three porteños stories Arturo Cancela. This period includes novels The Dream of Heroes, Diary of the Pig War, Sleep in the sun and The Adventure of a Photographer in La Plataas well as most stories published after Prodigious history.

However, it is possible to find constant themes in all of Bioy's work, such as the Faustian pact, the recurring presence of female characters, time travel or the questioning of the perception of reality. Against the grain of the In the definitions of Roger Caillois and Tzvetan Todorov, who consider the fantastic as the irruption of an inexplicable event in a realistic environment, in Bioy the fantastic is usually more linked to the incursion of the characters into a mysterious or strange terrain, in a world that coexists next to the real one, of which there is no notion but with which it is united. These incursions frequently take place based on the mythologem of travel or escape: their protagonists usually look for a few days off or escape from something, an escape that leads them to spaces where the fantastic event takes place and then return or try to return to the comfort of its daily reality, which links Bioy to the model of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Like Borges, he prefers the development of a single fantastic event that ultimately finds its explanation; however, his tendency towards psychological characterization, his concern for creating an environment, and his interest in the daily life of the Argentine middle classes also bring him closer to Julio Cortázar, with whom they read and recognized each other, despite the fact that they rarely met in person.

Along with the fantastic, love is the other recurring theme in his works, which is usually framed within the clichés of romanticism or even courtly love: women often appear as ambiguous, almost inhuman beings, as beautiful as terrible, capable of leading men to death; At the same time, the male leads are often insanely obsessed devotees, even when they know the object of their desires is unattainable. The critic José Miguel Oviedo highlights the "deliberately senseless and incompetent" nature of the latter, as well as the fact that, in his opinion, "strangeness often arises from the humorous or grotesque angle from which the unreal is contemplated", which It leads him to describe the works of Bioy Casares as "fantastic comedies". However, there is a certain critical consensus in considering that in the author's late works there is a gradual simplification of his plots and his writing that tarnishes the final result.

Work

Novels

• The invention of Morel (1940)
• Evasion plan (1945)
• The Dream of Heroes (1954)
• Diary of the Pig War (1969)
• Sleep in the sun (1973)
• The Adventure of a Photographer in La Plata (1985)
• A matching champion (1993)
• From one world to another (1998)

Stories

• The celestial plot (1948)
• Prodigious history (1956)
• Garland with love (1959)
• The side of the shadow (1962)
• The great seraphim (1967)
• The hero of women (1978)
• Outstanding stories (1986)
• A Russian doll (1991)
• A modest magic (1997)

Anthologies

• Adolfo Bioy Casares (1963)
• Adverse miracles (1969)
• Fantastic stories (1972)
• Stories of love (1972)
• The celestial plot and other accounts (1983)
• Selected works (1985)
• Pages of Adolfo Bioy Casares selected by the author (1985)
• The Journey and the Other Reality (1988)
• Invention and plot (1989)

Essays

• The other adventure (1968)
• Memory on the pampa and gauchos (1970)
• Breve dictionary of exquisite Argentine (1971)
• Of the wonderful things (1999)

Daily

• A few days in Brazil (1991)
• Rest of walkers (2001). Edited by Daniel Martino.
• Borges (2006). Edited in collaboration with Daniel Martino.
• Wilcock (2021). Edited by Daniel Martino

Scripts

• The orilleros (1955)
• The Paradise of Believers (1955)
• Invasion (1969, led by Hugo Santiago Muchnik)
• Les Autres (1971, led by Hugo Santiago Muchnik)

Others

• Memories (1994, autobiography)
• Travel (1967) (1996, letters). Edited by Daniel Martino.
• Other gardens. Open book (1997, compilation of phrases, poems and other texts). Edited in collaboration with Daniel Martino.

Works repudiated by the author

• Prologue (1929), stories and miscellaneous.
• 17 shots against the future (1933), with the pseudonym Martin Sacastru, stories.
• Caos (1934), stories.
• The New Storm or The Multiple Life of Juan Ruteno (1935), novel.
• Home statue (1936), miscellaneous.
• Luis Greve, dead (1937), stories.

In collaboration

Anthologies

• Anthology of fantastic literature (1940, with Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo)
• Argentinian poetic anthology (1941, with Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo)
• Best police stories (1943, with Jorge Luis Borges)
• The best police stories. Second instalment (1951, with Jorge Luis Borges)
• Short and extraordinary stories (1955, with Jorge Luis Borges)
• Book of Heaven and Hell (1960, with Jorge Luis Borges)

With Jorge Luis Borges

• Six problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1942)
• Two memorable fantasies (1946)
• A model for death (1946)
• Domecq Bust Chronicles (1967)
• New Tales of Bustos Domecq (1977)
• Museum. Unpublished texts (2003)

With Silvina Ocampo

• Those who love, hate (1946)

Films based on his works

• The Crime of Oribe (1950), based on the story The perjury of snowperformed by Leopoldo Torre Nilson in co-direction with his father, Leopoldo Torres Rios.
• Last year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, 1961), directed by Alain Resnais, with script by Alain Robbe-Grillet, based on The invention of Morel.
• L'invenzione di Morel (Morel's Invention), directed by Emidio Greco with script by Andrea Barbato (1974), Italy.
• The Pig War (1975), from Argentina, based on the novel Diary of the Pig Wardirected by Leopoldo Torre Nilson.
• In memory of Pauline (1991), directed by Alejandro Areal Vélez.
• The Dream of Heroes (1997), led by Sergio Renán.
• Sleep in the sun (2012), directed by Alejandro Chomski.
• Those who love, hate (2017), directed by Alejandro Maci.

Tributes

• In the fourth episode of the fourth season of the television series Lost, one of the main characters is reading The Invention of Morel; the creators of the series are admirers of the book and has been awarded to the work as inspiration for the series. From this, in 2008, the sales of Bioy Casares’ books in the United States were fired.
• In the book The muses of Rorschach Javier Casis Arín's "Dear Luisa" story works as an antecedent The invention of Morel, while in the story "The motives of Rozman", Bioy Casares appears as a character.
• From 22 September 2011, the stretch of Eduardo Schiaffino street in front of Plaza San Martín de Tours, which runs alongside the building of Posadas 1650, where he lived from 1954 to his death, bears the name of Adolfo Bioy Casares.
• In the neighborhood of La Gavia in Madrid there is also a street that reminds the writer. La calle da número a un centro comercial muy popular de Madrid.

Awards and distinctions

• First Municipal Award (1940) - by The invention of Morel
• National Literature Prize (1970)
• SADE Award of Honor (1975)
• Knight of the Legion of Honor (1981)
• Mondello Literary Prize (Italy, 1984).
• Illa International Literary Award (Italy, 1986)
• Ciudadano Ilustre de Buenos Aires (1986)
• National Consecration of Letters of the Ministry of Culture (1987)
• Miguel de Cervantes Award (1990)
• Knight of the Legion of Honour (France, 1991)
• Alfonso Reyes International Prize (Mexico, 1991)
• XI Grinzane Cavour Award (Italy, 1992)
• Gold Medal of the Complutense University of Madrid (1994)
• Konex Award by Brillante (1994)
• Doctorate Honoris Causa of the National University of Cuyo (1994)
• Roger Caillois Award (France, 1995)
• Jerusalem 2000 Award awarded by the Argentine House in Israel (OAS, Washington, 1996)

Predecessor: Augusto Roa Bastos

Miguel de Cervantes Award 1990

Successor: Francisco Ayala