Adolfo Bioy Casares “was really and secretly the master”, once wrote Jorge Luis Borges (1970: 40), who was a close friend of his and co-authored many books with him. Indeed, over the course of 70 years, Bioy Casares wrote a great number of novels, short stories, literary essays, and screenplays, making him one the greatest contemporary Argentinian writers. In particular, his masterpiece, La invención de Morel (1940) [The Invention of Morel], was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century.

Bioy Casares wrote tales mostly in the fields of science fiction, dystopia, mysteries and the detective genre. His work explored themes such as the dynamics of desire and cruelty, the relationship between love and death, the deceptions of the senses, the metaphysical questions on the essence of time and identity, and the epistemological doubts on the knowability of reality. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz wrote that, in Bioy Casares’ fiction, “el amor es una percepción privilegiada, la más total y lúcida, no sólo de la irrealidad del mundo sino de la nuestra: corremos tras de sombras pero nosotros también somos sombras” (Paz 1971: 21; “Love is a privileged perception, the most total and lucid, not only of the unreality of the world, but of our own unreality: we do not only traverse a realm of shadows, but ourselves are shadows”).

Bioy Casares was born on September 15, 1914 in Buenos Aires. He was the only child of a wealthy family. His father, Adolfo Bioy Domecq, was an Argentinian lawyer and politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs during the 1930s. His wife, Marta Ignacia Casares Lynch, was reputed to be a great beauty in her youth. Bioy Casares was destined to study law, but he left university to pursue his passion for literature.

Bioy Casares’ first book—Prólogo (1929) [Prologue]—was a collection of short stories. It was followed by another five volumes: 17 disparos contra lo porvenir (1933) [17 Shots against the Future], published under the pseudonym of Martin Sacastru; Caos (1934) [Chaos]; La estatua casera (1936) [The Household Statue]; Luis Greve, muerto (1937) [Luis Greve, Deceased]; and La nueva tormenta o La vida múltiple de Juan Ruteno (1935) [The New Storm or Juan Ruteno’s Multiple Life]. Later, Bioy Casares characterized these volumes as “los seis peores libros del mundo” (Bioy Casares 1994: 239; “the worst six books in the world”), repudiating everything that he wrote before 1940 and forbidding their reprinting. His biographies read that he even searched for the remaining copies in the bookshops of Buenos Aires so that he could get rid of them.

In the meantime, Bioy Casares met Borges and the Ocampo sisters, Victoria and Silvina. These encounters changed his literary career and his personal life. Victoria Ocampo was already a well-known writer, publisher, and patron of writers; she was the editor of “Sur”, a literary magazine in which Bioy Casares and Borges eventually published some of their best stories. Silvina was a refined poetess, and, in 1940, she became Bioy Casares’ wife. In 1954 the couple adopted Martha, a child that Bioy Casares had with another woman.

In 1940, Bioy Casares wrote La invención de Morel [The Invention of Morel], a novel that, according to Borges, contained a perfect plot. The novel tells the story of a scientist, Morel, who brings a group of friends—including Faustine, the woman with whom he fell unhappily in love—for a holiday to the island of Villings. There, his invention—a sort of magical camera—captures all of them and endlessly reproduces their appearances down to the smallest detail, stealing their souls.

A fugitive arrives on the island and falls in love with Faustine, but slowly discovers that he is surrounded by a crowd of holograms. He has to choose whether to destroy Morel’s invention, extinguishing Faustine’s image, or to be captured and enter her fictional world at the cost of his own life: “Estar en una isla habitada por fantasmas artificiales era la más insoportable de las pesadillas”, the fugitive says, “estar enamorado de una de esas imágenes era peor que estar enamorado de un fantasma” (Bioy Casares 1997 [1940]: I/1 72; “To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares,—to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost”).

Bioy Casares, Borges, and Silvina Ocampo edited two successful collections: Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940) [Anthology of Fantasy]—with extracts ranging from ancient writers, such as Petronius and Chuang Tzu, to contemporary ones, such as Saki and Macedonio Fernández—and Antología poética argentina (1941) [Anthology of Argentinian poetry].

Bioy Casares and Borges also wrote a volume of detective tales, Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi (1942) [Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi], which was published under the pseudonym of Honorio Bustos Domecq. In contrast to the American hard-boiled vogue of crime writing, they conceived this literary genre in a different way, rooted in the British tradition and based on the solution of logical enigmas. This intellectual—almost philosophical—idea of the detective genre also permeated the anthology Los mejores cuentos policiales (1943) [The Best Crime Stories], which they edited the following year.

Bioy Casares’ and Borges’ literary circle was depicted by Borges in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940), the first short story of his Ficciones (1944) [Fictions]. A character in the tale, Bioy Casares discusses with the narrator the strange case of an entry he read in his copy of the Anglo-American Encyclopaedia that describes the mysterious country of Uqbar, which was absent from all other known copies.

In the following two decades, Borges and Bioy Casares’ collaboration was enriched by many other co-authored volumes, including Dos fantasías memorables (1946) [Two Memorable Fantasies], Un modelo para la muerte (1946) [A Model for Death], Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (1967) [Chronicles of Bustos Domecq], and Nuevos cuentos de Bustos Domecq (1977) [New Stories by Bustos Domecq]. They also co-edited two other volumes of short prose: Cuentos breves y extraordinarios (1955) [Short and Amazing Stories] and Libro del cielo y del infierno (1960) [The Book of Heaven and Hell].

Concurrently, Bioy Casares continued his own writing. Five years after La invención de Morel, he published another novel—Plan de evasión (1945) [A Plan for Escape]—which reworked similar themes but did not have the same success. The plot revolves around strange events that happen on a prison island in the Caribbean. A French Navy lieutenant, Enrique Nevers, discovers that the warden, Pedro Castel, altered the perceptions of the prisoners, inducing synesthetic fusions that render the island a dark hallucination.

One year later, Bioy Casares wrote Los que aman, odian (1946) [Those Who Love, Hate] with his wife. The novel tells the story of Dr. Huberman, who is searching for the delights of solitude in a secluded hotel but is soon involved in a double mystery when one man is killed, and another is missing. All of the characters suspect each other, and the novel becomes a psychological exploration of human desires and fears.

A new collection of short stories—La trama celeste (1948) [The Celestial Plot]—was published three years later. The titular tale revolves around the story of an injured pilot who is not recognized by his army unit after an accident. He later discovers that he travelled in a parallel world.

In 1954, Bioy Casares wrote another novel, El sueño de los héroes (1954) [The Dream of Heroes]. This book again explored the themes of repetition and death. The main character, Emilio Gauna, wins a pretty sum betting on horses and decides to celebrate with friends. At the end of three nights of revelry, something cruel happens, but he cannot remember the details. Many years later, he reunites his old friends to celebrate a new win, but discovers, at his own expense, that there was a duel in his blurred past.

Bioy Casares published other collections during the next few years, such as Historia prodigiosa (1956) [A Remarkable History], Guirnalda con amores (1959) [Garland with Lovers], El lado de la sombra (1962) [The Shady Side], and El gran Serafín (1967) [The Great Seraph]. These tales reworked the typical traits of Bioy Casares’ writing—metaphysical inquietude, fanciful connections, and tragic loves. El gran Serafín, for example, describes strange events happening during a holiday that are revealed to be the signs of the apocalypse.

A liberal intellectual, Bioy Casares detested the demagogic leaders and dictators that ruled his country during his life. Political themes clearly emerge in the novel Diario de la guerra del cerdo (1969) [Diary of the War of the Pig], which alludes both to Peronism and to Juan Carlos Onganía’s military junta. The plot is set in a dystopian Buenos Aires, where violent youngsters kill the elderly, accusing them of being selfish and cowardly. The generational clash is seen from the eyes of an old man, Isidoro Vidal, reflecting the fears of the author, who had just turned 55: “Creyó por primera vez entender por qué se decía que la vida es sueño: si uno vive bastante, los hechos de su vida, como los de un sueño, su vuelven incomunicables porque a nadie interesan” (Bioy Casares 1997 [1969]: I/2 89; “He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone”).

Bioy Casares’ next novel, Dormir al sol (1973) [Asleep in the Sun], explored the themes of the duplication of reality and the relationship between people and animals. The main character is Lucho Bordenave, a watchmaker whose wife is put in a psychiatric clinic, because they think she is neurotic. When she is released, he discovers that she is no longer the same. Her soul mysteriously passed into a dog and vice versa, and a similar metamorphosis begins to affect Lucho.

In El héroe de las mujeres (1978) [The Hero of Women], Bioy Casares returned to the short story format, and seven years passed before his next novel. La aventura de un fotógrafo en La Plata (1985) [The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata] tells the story of Nicolasito Almanza, a young photographer who goes to La Plata for a photo-reportage of the city. The people he meets continually hinder his project, so that the main theme of the novel is not Nicolasito’s reportage but the representability of the world.

After this novel, two short story collections appeared: Historias desaforadas (1986) [Colossal Stories] and Una muñeca rusa (1991) [A Russian Doll]. The titular tale in the latter collection revolves around the efforts of the main character to discover the secret of eternal youth in order to conquer the woman he loves; however, his bet ends up changing him into something he does not want to be.

Bioy Casares’ language was very direct and lapidary, revealing his search for the best effect with the least rhetorical effort. He was a master in the art of dialogue and metaphysical humor. His poetics required him to be a fine connoisseur of a vast range of linguistic registers, as Bioy Casares showed in writing his Breve diccionario del argentino exquisito (1971) [Brief Dictionary of Exquisite Argentine Spanish].

Bioy Casares also worked for the cinema. He wrote the screenplays of four movies: Los orilleros (1955) [The Hoodlums]; El paraíso de los creyentes (1955) [The Paradise of the Believers], which was never shot; Invasión (1969) [Invasion]; and Les Autres (1971) [The Others]. The latter two were directed by Hugo Santiago.

La invención de Morel was the basis for Alain Resnais’s movie, L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) [Last Year at Marienbad]. The screenplay was written by the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, demonstrating how much Bioy Casares’ novel influenced the nouveau roman. Some years later, a cinematic adaptation, L’invenzione di Morel (1975) [Morel’s Invention], was made by the Italian director, Emidio Greco. Many of Bioy Casares’ other works were also brought to the big screen, including El crimen de Oribe (1950) [Oribe’s Crime], Dormir al sol (2012) [Asleep in the Sun], and Los que aman, odian (2017) [Those Who Love, Hate].

Many television series—from Lost (2004-2010) to Black Mirror (2011-) and Westworld (2016-)—were clearly inspired by La invención de Morel. Bioy Casares could not have known it in 1940, but his nightmare anticipated what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would have called hyperreality and its simulacra: “Yo y mis compañeros somos apariencias, somos una nueva clase de fotografías”, says his fugitive (Bioy Casares 1997 [1940]: I/1 71; “My companions and I are mere appearances, we are a new kind of photographs”).

The last years of Bioy Casares’ life were affected by many mournful events, such as the deaths of his wife, Silvina (1993), and his daughter, Martha (1994). His last works were two novels—Un campeón desparejo (1993) [An Uneven Champion] and De un mundo a otro (1998) [From a World to Another One]—and the short stories collected in Una magia modesta (1997) [A Modest Magic].

Bioy Casares died in 1999 at the age of 84. After his death, several posthumous texts were published, such as Descanso de caminantes (2001) [Rest of Walkers], Museo (2003) [Museum], which was written with Borges, and Borges (2006), which was edited by Daniel Martino and contained passages from Bioy Casares’ diaries about his friend.

REFERENCES

Barrera, Trinidad. De fantasías y galanteos. Estudios sobre Adolfo Bioy Casares. Roma: Bulzoni. 2001.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Autobiographical Notes.” Trans. N.T. Di Giovanni. The New Yorker, September 19, 1970, pp. 40-99.
Bioy Casares, Alberto. Memorias. Barcelona: Tusquets. 1994.
—. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Norma. 1997-1999, 3 vols.
Levine, Suzanne Jill. Guía de Adolfo Bioy Casares. Madrid: Fundamentos. 1982.
Martino, Daniel. ABC de Adolfo Bioy Casares. Buenos Aires: Emecé. 1989.
Paz, Octavio. “La máscara y la transparencia”. In Helmy F. Giacoman (ed.), Homenaje a Carlos Fuentes: Variaciones interpretativas en torno a su obra. Long Island: Las Américas. 1971, pp. 15-22.
Posso, Karl (ed.). Adolfo Bioy Casares: Borges, Fiction and Art. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2012.

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Citation: Marfe, Luigi. "Adolfo Bioy Casares". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 June 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12766, accessed 17 July 2025.]