Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) was a prominent Argentine writer and man of letters who became a major figure in world literature and who championed a Latin American tradition of literary fantasy and detective fiction that pushed back against a dominant culture of realism. In so doing, Bioy Casares helped to create a space for later generations of fantastical writers, including Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. His fiction emphasized the metaphysical and mysterious and had surreal, abstract elements, although he famously was not impressed meeting André Breton and did not consider himself a surrealist per se. Bioy Casares was also an avid sportsman who boxed and played rugby but especially enjoyed tennis. He cultivated a well-rounded, cosmopolitan lifestyle that included trips to Europe centered around art and book culture.
A close friend and contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, Bioy Casares was married to the noted writer Silvina Ocampo. Ocampo’s sister Victoria founded and ran the Argentine literary magazine Sur, which would provide a home for many of the best short stories and essays by all three writers. Together Bioy Casares, Borges, and Ocampo would edit the classic, highly influential Antología de la Literatura Fantástica (1940), reprinted in an updated English-language version in 1988 as The Book of Fantasy. Borges and Bioy Casares also wrote short satirical fiction under the pen name H. Bustos Domecq, although their first collaboration was writing advertising copy for various health products targeting the sedentary.
“The Invention of Morel” (1940) is Bioy Casares’s most famous work (a novella) and, among other surreal speculative elements, features a narrator who is invisible to the inhabitants of the island he visits. The novella came about as the result of Bioy Casares wanting to create something unique out of the standard adventure story. As a measure of his success, “The Invention of Morel” was the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s movie Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which changed the history of film. The novella has even been referenced in the television series Lost. Borges considered the work to be comparable in its influence and success to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Franz Kafka’s The Trial.
Other works include El sueño del los héroes (1954; The Dream of Heroes, 1987), which examines a workman’s being saved from death by a mysterious figure, possibly supernatural, and the repetition of the same events years later; it was avowedly influenced by the time theories of J. W. Dunne. Dormir al sol (1973; Asleep in the Sun, 1978) features soul transplants and conflates the transformations of psychosurgery with totalitarianism.
Bioy Casares fell out of favor during the various iterations of the Perón regimes in Argentina, his and Sur’s remit seen as not nationalistic enough and too elite. He was quietly and not so quietly an anti-Perónist; Borges and Bioy teamed up once again, under the pen name B. Suárez Lynch, to write savage satires of Perón and others of that political persuasion. Meanwhile, his family’s background as landowners grated against the populist origins of revolution in the 1970s. Close associates, such as Borges, were labeled “literary oligarchs,” even though, in literary terms, Bioy’s championing of nonrealistic fiction would always be out of step with the status quo. However, after the iniquities of that era and a return to democracy, Bioy Casares regained his iconic status as an important literary figure—largely due to the universal nature of his best fiction. In 1990, he received the Cervantes Prize, one of the highest honors for a Spanish-language author.
“The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink,” presented here in a new translation—the first since the story’s inclusion in The Book of Fantasy—is a unique tale of alien contact.