Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

The novella, rather than the novel, is a Spanish invention by the same man who wrote “Don Quixote”: Miguel de Cervantes. He called his novellas “exemplary novels” and claimed to be the first writer who wrote novellas in Spanish. Though the novella has not been widely cultivated in Spain, there are two examples written in this century that are more masterful than exemplary. They are two novellas of impossible love: “Morel’s Invention” by Adolfo Bioy Casares, and “Valentin” by Juan Gil-Albert. Bioy Casares is an Argentine writer; Gil-Albert is a Spaniard from Valencia.

“Morel’s Invention” (published in 1940) is the fantastic tale of a castaway who lands on an uncharted island, where he falls in love with a strange, beautiful woman he sees from afar until he discovers that she is a phantasm created by an amazing machine: the invention of the title. It is the best love story written in Spanish in this century, of which none other than Jorge Luis Borges said: “To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.”

“Valentin” is a story of homosexual love in Shakespeare’s time--on his stage even. Written underground in 1964 but published in Spain in 1974, it has never been translated into English, though it does for the Shakespearean stage more, much more than the spurious “Shakespeare in Love” about a heterosexual Shakespeare. Gil-Albert in his masterpiece shows that he knows all about Shakespeare and his stage and the so-called real life in the Elizabethan era.

Both books are tragedies of unrequited love.