This novella is full of anguish. The last thirty pages and the end are quite interesting and suggestive. Very curious take on science fiction ( )

amazing imagination the author has!
some thing just can be imagine once ( )

Bioy Casares was a good friend of Borges who said of this novel, in the prologue to the edition that I have that “To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole”. I’m not sure I would share Borges’s opinion, though the story is an interesting riff on reality and given that it was written over forty years ago, it is prescient in the number of social and other issues that it touches upon.

The story is told in the first person by a man who has escaped from custody to an unknown, uninhabited island that has a museum, a chapel, a swimming pool, a mill (we are never clear what the crime was, but it seemed to entail the death penalty). At least the island is initially uninhabited, but then a group of “people” arrive and the protagonist, fearful that they are part of a larger plot by the police to try to capture him, hides in the marshy areas of the island, in some considerable physical discomfort, from which he skulks about the island spying on the arrivals. To complicate matters, and the emotions of the protagonist, he falls in love with one of the arrivals….a strange relationship of unrequited love, unrequited attention, even unrequited awareness that baffles him until he discovers that the arrivals are, in fact, not real people, but sort of holographic images stuck in repeating scenes of activity, like an eternally running loop of film. This is adumbrated (in hindsight) early in the story when the protagonist notes, “I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.” Ah, but do the images have consciousness? They have no free will, though the inventor of the machine that creates them (Morel) hopes to imbue them with it.

The protagonist (who is recording the story in a diary) discovers the secret of the machines and inserts himself into the loop, so that he can be with his love thus blurring the lines between realities, and uttering one of the most plaintive of all cries at the very end of the book when he writes: “To the person who reads this diary and then invents a machine that can assemble disjoined presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety.” Just as one can never enter entirely into the consciousness, the core of a person, even a person one loves, so the protagonist finds himself, in the extreme, eternally outside the consciousness of his “love”.

This slim volume touches upon a number of interesting themes and issues: the Malthusian theory of population growth, prospects for environmental disasters, the cloning of human beings, the existence of parallel universes. The choice of the name “Faustine” is obviously not accidental and the protagonist does indeed abandon his soul, his physical consciousness in entering into the loop of images. As a Canadian, I was intrigued by two references, one to the province of Quebec and one to Canada as place that Faustine talks about. Maybe Bioy Casares visited Canada at some point in his life.

This book was a bit like a fine-dining experience; the portion appears small but at the end of the meal you are surprisingly stuffed. Casares packs so much into this little book that I find the more I think about it the more I like it and the more I feel, well satisfied. In fact, as I think about it these South American writers are extraordinarily good at the novella. I read Marquez's "Memory of My Melancholy Whores" earlier this year and although I didn't love it I couldn't stop thinking about it for a couple of days either. The whole story is told to us through the diary entries of a condemned man who has escaped to a deserted island. We never know what he did but there are hints of political dissident and maybe violence. The narrator is incredibly unreliable but you find yourself caught up with him and even for a moment believing like him that the craziness on the island is an elaborate rouse to recapture him. Central to the story is a kind of love triangle that explores obsession and idealization. It is through this love triangle that the narrator begins to grow and ultimately finds redemption. To really go into the thought provoking elements of the novel would give away all the fun so I'll spare you but if you and just say if you have ever had a crush/fascination on a celebrity you might find this novella interesting. ( )

Written by an "intellectual peer" of Borges; Place: Desert Island Perks:Kafka-esque, on tv show Lost, short