NYRB Classics: Howells and Casares

NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank concludes his guided tour of some of the line's highlights with a dual recommendation. Look for him tonight with John Banville at Three Lives, as Banville talks about J. G. Farrell...

"I want to bring up two wonderful and wonderfully unexpected love stories. If you can imagine Jane Austen as an American writer (if...), then William Dean Howells's Indian Summer might be her work. Acid and amusing and wise in equal degrees, this story of sudden infatuation and extensive (comic, awkward, excruciatingly embarrassing) reconsideration is a pleasure from beginning to end--and the end, let me assure you, for all the detours along the way, is happy.

"The Argentinean Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel is a surreal account of a fugitive who finds himself on a remote island, where the other inhabitants pay no attention to him, even as they go about a strange unvarying daily routine. When the narrator at last discovers that his beloved is only an image (he is caught in a kind of film loop) he wishes only to join her in her perfect unreality--which is of course the only conclusion to any perfect love."