Finally, the writer cannot resist approaching Faustine any longer, but she refuses to acknowledge him. By eavesdropping on their conversations, he learns that the man is called Morel and the woman Faustine. He joins the woman on several occasions, until the writer begins to feel jealous of him. He does not seem of a piece with the other visitors. One evening, she is joined by a strange-looking man in tennis clothes.
Observing her from a distance, the writer begins to develop passionate feelings for her. One young woman comes to sit on the rocks along the beach every day at sunset. He retreats to the swampy part of the island, watching the visitors from a distance. He even suspects that the visitors are part of a plot to entrap him. The writer is relieved to have company, but he fears that if he makes contact with them, news of his presence on the island might reach the Venezuelan authorities. He notices that they are playing the same two songs over and over again. Loneliness gradually begins to threaten the writer’s sanity, until one day, as he returns home, he hears music playing from the Museum and sees a group of carefree people dancing and laughing. He makes a hole in the wall, and sees an inactive engine room, although he cannot work out what the engines are supposed to power. The writer finds several large, once-elegant buildings, including one so monumental that he calls it “the Museum.” He takes up residence there, discovering that its basement is sealed. Due to the danger of the sickness, and the difficulty of surviving on the island, the writer suspects that his journal may also be his will. He knows that recent visitors to the island have contracted a mysterious sickness, whose symptoms resemble those of radiation poisoning, but fearful of the authorities at his back, the writer decided to row to the island anyway.
He is alone on Villings Island, which he came to after learning that it had been abandoned. The writer hopes his journal will form the basis for a novel, or at least that recording his experiences will help him stay sane. The novella takes the form of a journal, kept by an unnamed writer who is on the run. They are observed by the novella’s narrator, a political criminal who has come to the island to hide from the Venezuelan authorities. A literary thought experiment in the manner of Bioy Casares’ close friend Jorge Luis Borges, The Invention of Morel imagines an island on which a group of wealthy socialites unknowingly relive a single holiday over and over again. The Invention of Morel ( La invención de Morel) is a 1940 novella by Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares.
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