[An American theater critic, Frankel has worked for the Saturday Evening Post, National Observer, and the New York Times. He is also a screenwriter and has collaborated on books with such noted entertainers as Uta Hagen and Milton Berle. In the following excerpt, he describes the short fiction in The Invention of Morel, and Other Stories as imaginative though hindered by reliance on a single narrative technique.]

[The Invention of Morel, and Other Stories by Adolfo Bioy Casares contains] the novella, The Invention of Morel (which won the 1941 Primer Premio Municipal Award in Buenos Aires) and … six short stories originally collected in a volume entitled La Trama Celeste. Here is an interesting mind at work, a mind involved with science, philosophy and psychology. His stories are adventures, albeit slow moving, in which time and space are mere mists through which he easily passes. The stories often verge on science-fiction, occasionally are tinged with the occult.

In the novella, the narrator-diarist tells of his experience on an island populated by a group—and especially one woman with whom he falls in love—who do not seem aware of him as he moves among them. They are fully-dimensioned projections of the cameras of the inventor Morel, who recorded a week's visit by the group to the island, years before the narrator's arrival. Morel's indestructible machines repeat that week over and over for all time. Eventually the narrator attempts to join his love in the projected reality.

In one of the short stories, "The Celestial Plot," Casares offers the existence of "infinite identical worlds, infinite worlds with slight variations, infinite different worlds" as a pilot takes off from one Buenos Aires and arrives at another. In "The Other Labyrinth," a man of the 20th century dies in the 17th century and "proves that successive time is a mere illusion of men and that we live in an eternity where everything is simultaneous."

It is plot, which reveals itself like a trip through a maze, which dominates this author's work. Though the stories are fully populated, the characters are secondary. Casares is not much concerned with the who, what and why of his people; they exist for him as needed guides to lead the reader through cerebral adventures.

That ultimately one leaves Casares without a feeling of enrichment is not his fault—but rather that of his publisher, who has done him the disservice of combining these six short stories and the novella into one volume. It is too much of a good thing. If the reader is at first fascinated by the way he "unpeels" a story, that same reader will be bored long before the book is finished.

Six of the seven stories are told by a first-person narrator whose method of story-telling makes him seem the same person over and over. The reader comes away not remembering how imaginative a talent Casares possesses but how small a range of expression he seems to have. I am certain he deserves a better fate than to be thought of as a tenor with one glorious note.