Adolfo Bioy Casares

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Adolfo Bioy Casares (1942)

Adolfo Bioy Casares (born September 15, 1914 in Buenos Aires , † March 8, 1999 there ) was an Argentine writer .

Life

Adolfo Bioy Casares, the son of Adolfo Bioy Domecq and Marta Ignacia Casares Lynch, came from a wealthy family, the Irish on the successful emigrants Patrick Lynch declined and whose members also a Chilean Navy Admiral, the Argentine writer Benito Lynch and the revolutionary Che Guevara were among . At the age of eleven he wrote his first story, Iris and Margarita . In addition to Spanish, he spoke French, English and German early on; university studies - law, philosophy, and literature - bored him and he never got a degree.

He was a friend of Jorge Luis Borges , whom he met in 1932 at Victoria Ocampo and with whom he wrote many works under the pseudonyms H. Bustos Domecq or B. Suarez Lynch . Two years later at Ocampo he met her sister , who was also writing, Silvina Ocampo , whom he married in 1940. The couple themselves remained childless, but in 1954 adopted Marta, a daughter of Bioy Casares from another relationship. Marta died in a car accident in 1994, shortly after her adoptive mother Silvina Ocampo died. The couple's inheritance was later awarded by a court to another illegitimate child - Fabián Bioy - when the latter himself had died at the age of 40.

In contrast to other Argentine writers, Bioy Casares did not feel compelled to leave his country during the years of the military dictatorship.

plant

La invención de Morel (1940, German Morel's invention ) is one of the author's outstanding books that have been published again and again internationally . The narrow novel tells how a man on the run from justice ends up on a remote island, the inhabitants of which seem to be afflicted with strange, terrifying diseases. It turns out, however, that the other people on the island are actually records, three-dimensional imitations indistinguishable from reality that are produced by Morel's invention and are in part even self-aware. The book anticipates motifs from virtuality , is considered one of the first examples of genuine South American science fiction and a source of inspiration for the film Last Year in Marienbad and the successful television series Lost .

In El sueño de los héroes (1954, Eng. The Heroes' Dream ), Bioy Casares describes a sprawling carnival celebration that lasts for several days and then lets the protagonist live on with the unsettling idea that he was stabbed to death in the course of drunken hostilities. It wasn't until years later when he went around the houses with his friends that his fate was fulfilled and he died in a knife fight. The motif of the self-fulfilling prophecy (also found frequently in the work of his friend Jorge Luis Borges) is intertwined in the book with a deep-seated doubt about what is reality. The novel Dormir al Sol (1973, English Sleep in the Sun ) is also about identity and reality , in which a man, annoyed by the moods of his wife and irritated by her increasingly unpredictable nature, allows himself to be persuaded by an acquaintance, the lady to send his heart to psychiatric treatment. The woman who returns healed is gentle and considerate, but the man realizes that it is no longer the person he loved. Their soul has been exchanged. This realization throws him into a double identity crisis: who exactly did he love? And who exactly was it that fell in love?

Prizes and awards

His prizes and awards include the SADE Grand Prize (Argentine Writers' Association) in 1975, the French Legion of Honor in 1981, the title of Famous Citizen of Buenos Aires in 1986, the Premio Mondello in 1984 and the Cervantes Prize in 1990 (presented in 1991 in Alcalá de Henares ). Bioy Casares is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.

Works

Novels

Stories / short stories

  • Prólogo (1929)
  • 17 disparos contra el porvenir (1933)
  • La estatua casera (1936)
  • Luis Greve, muerto (1937)
  • La trama celeste (1948)
  • Las vísperas de Fausto (1949)
  • Historia prodigiosa (1956)
  • Guirnalda con amores (1959)
  • El lado de la sombra (1962)
  • El gran serafín (1967)
  • Love stories (1972 in the original: Historias de amor ) ISBN 3-518-38201-2
  • The foreign servant (1972 in the original: Historias fantásticas ) ISBN 3-518-37462-1
  • El heroe de las mujeres (1978)
  • Historias desaforadas (1986)

Letters

  • En viaje (1996), letters to Silvina

Works in collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges

  • Six tasks for Don Isidro Parodi (1942 in the original: Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi )
  • Dos fantasías memorables (1946)
  • Murder by model (1946 in the original: Un modelo para la muerte ) ISBN 3-596-10595-1
  • Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (1967 in the original: Crónicas de Bustos Domecq )
  • The Book of Heaven and Hell (1960 in the original: Libro del cielo y del infierno ) ISBN 3-596-10587-0
  • New Stories by Bustos Domecq (1977 in the original: Nuevos cuentos de Bustos Domecq )

Dos fantasías memorables and Murder by Model were originally printed in 300 copies at their own expense. The first commercial editions were made in 1970.

Works in collaboration with Silvina Ocampo

  • The hatred of lovers (1946 in the original: Los que aman, odian )

literature

  • Michael Rössner : In the beginning there was a fantastic idea. Interview with Adolfo Bioy Casares, in: Wiener Journal, No. 141, June 1992.
  • Jorge L. Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Hugo Santiago, Gilles Deleuze , Jean-Pierre Faye , Jacques Roubaud : The Others. (Screenplay), Internationaler Merve Diskurs Vol. 138, Merve Verlag, Berlin 1987. ISBN 3-88396-058-6
  • Kian-Harald Karimi: La gente no mata por buenas razones - The metaphysical fantasy as an interpretation of modern biopower in novels by Bioy Casares. In: Claudia Leitner, Christopher F. Laferl (ed.): About the limits of natural life. Forms of staging the human-animal-machine relationship in the Iberoromania, Lit Verlag, Münster 2009, pp. 123–141. ISBN 978-3-8258-0289-9
  • Karsten Kruschel : Morel's invention , in: The Science Fiction Year 2004 , edited by Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-453-87896-5 , pp. 861–866.
  • Wolfram Nitsch: The island of reproductions. Medium and play in Bioy Casares' short story "La invención de Morel". In: Iberoromania - magazine for the Iberoromanic languages ​​and literatures in Europe and America, 2004, volume 60, issue 2, pages 102–117. ISSN  0019-0993
  • Alfonso de Toro; Susanna Regazzoni (Ed.): Homenaje a Adolfo Bioy Casares. Una retrospectiva de su obra. Literatura - ensayo - filosofía - teoría de la cultura - crítica literaria, theory and criticism of culture and literature . Vervuert, Frankfurt / Main 2002. ISBN 3-8935-4223-X
  • Silvia Renée Arias: Bioygrafía: vida y obra de Adolfo Bioy Casares , Buenos Aires: Tusquets Editores, April 2016, ISBN 978-987-670-351-2

criticism

  • Karsten Kruschel on the new edition of Morel's invention : "The fact that Adolfo Bioy Cesares thought about virtuality as early as 1940 is a strong one. Especially since some of his conclusions seem closely related to those that Stanislaw Lem raised when he published" Summa Technologiae "in 1964 ... But Bioy's little novel is also - and this sets him apart from the similar stories of the SF - a parable of the existence of the persecuted, who in his threat longs into another existence, one into which his persecutors do not In this respect, the book can be read in at least two fundamentally different ways. The clear and playful, concise prose in which it is all written makes reading a special pleasure ... A reading tip for everyone who is looking for something worth reading beyond the well-worn paths of science fiction on the ramified shores of the fantastic search."

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Ingrid Kreksch: Who is Who in Latin American Science Fiction - an overview. In: Wolfgang Jeschke (Ed.): Das Science Fiction Jahr 1999 , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-453-14984-X , p. 367.
  2. ↑ In the fourth episode of the fourth season, the series character Sawyer reads Morel's Invention on the beach .
  3. ↑ See The Science Fiction Year 2004. A yearbook for the science fiction reader. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, edited by Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke, Munich 2004, pp. 865f.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bioy Casares, Adolfo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Buenos Aires
DATE OF DEATH March 8, 1999
Place of death Buenos Aires