THE DREAM OF HEROES

by Adolfo Bioy Casares ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1988

This ""metaphysical mystery novel"" from Argentina, written in 1954 by a collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, is a poignant moral allegory about a sensitive boy doomed by machismo. Bioy Casares (Asleep in the Sun, 1978; A Plan for Escape, 1975) combines social and magical realism with an involuted structure that readers of Borges or of Garcia MÉrquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude will recognize. Emilio Gauna lives in the late 1920's in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. On the third day of Carnival in 1927, he wins a bet and goes on a debauch for three days with a group of vulgar comrades; he wakes with only the haunting memory of a masked girl. He is obsessed for the rest of his short life with unravelling the events of those three days. In a stylized film noire atmosphere of low stucco houses, patios, a cappella tangos, and purple evenings, he lives through the wonderful ambiguity of adolescence, courting a sorcerer's daughter and eventually marrying her, but never escaping his fate: ""a man could be in love with a woman and yet desire with a desperate and secret determination to be free of her."" Three years to the day from his 1927 debauch, Gauna wins a second bet and gathers the same group of former comrades for a ""definitive investigation"" of his destiny. That destiny is his doom, a function of a debased machismo that sorcery and love can postpone but not cancel. ""The concept of destiny,"" the sorcerer says, ""is a useful invention of man""; his words could as well be the words of Bioy Casares, who wraps his characters in a Borgean universe from which there is no escape. Here, fate is character and culture; the novel successfully satirizes the dream of heroes as it wonderfully evokes the Buenos Aires of the 1920's.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION