Borges.

By staff -- Críticas, 2/15/2007

Bioy Casares (1914–1999), a short story writer of great originality and style, is considered by many to have described the concept of virtual reality in his story “La invención de Morel” (“Morel’s invention,” 1940) a good half century before it became a familiar fixture of daily life. He was also a lifelong friend of Jose Luis Borges, with whom he published several collections of short stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. Their longstanding friendship began sometime between 1931 and 1932 when Bioy Casares presented a book in Buenos Aires and got into a conversation with Borges. Both men shared a passion for reading, and over the years they discussed the works of many writers, including Conrad, De Quincey, Stevenson, and Joyce, to name a few. Although Borges was 15 years older than Bioy Casares, their friendship had a continuity akin to an old, familiar marriage or a family relationship. Martino, Bioy Casares’s literary executor, has compiled the author’s diary entries into this enormous tome. Spanning from 1931 to 1989, these entries are filled with notations on daily lunches, shared readings, mutual friends, outings, and passions. The final entries deal with Borges’s last days. Although he was not at Borges’s side, Bioy Casares was given a detailed account of the great writer’s demise by an eyewitness; Borges died in a rented and numberless house on a Geneva street without a name, where apparently he had been happy. Bio Casares himself died in his beloved Buenos Aires a decade latter, having received the Cervantes prize for literature in 1990. Martino includes several excellent and useful indexes with the names of individuals and works mentioned, as well as detailed chronologies of the lives of both intellectuals. He also includes a wonderful collection of photographs that show the friends through the decades. A multivolume or abridged version would have been more appealing for general audiences since only scholars with a special interest would find this work necessary in its entirety. Recommended for public and academic libraries with strong holdings of Latin American literature.—Catherine Rendón, Savannah, GA