Review by Choice Review
This Argentine writer has achieved international recognition in recent years. The winner of numerous awards, including Spain's prestigious Cervantes Prize, his work has inspired films such as Eliseo Subiela's acclaimed "Man Facing Southeast." Bioy Casares's fiction revels in disquieting plots wherein logic and causality give way to the fantastic and the grotesque as part of everyday reality. His latest book continues in this vein. In it serious issues are foregrounded by means of surrealistic techniques. The damage done to the environment, for example, is highlighted in the eponymous "The Russian Doll" and in "Underwater" where monsters result from the ecological tampering of modern science. The pain of alterity becomes Bioy Casares's focus in "The Navigator Returns to His Country" whereby, through dream sequences, a South American embassy employee identifies with a fellow alien in Paris a poor Cambodian student who, like the South American, "they [also] judge to be different." In the story "Cato" the author returns to the issue of totalitarianism which he had treated in his 1940 "The Invention of Morel." Pinter-like black humor in the depiction of human relationships suffuses the sardonic "Our Trip (A Diary)" and his "Three Fantasies in Minor Key." This wonderful little book should continue to make Bioy Casares's fiction more familiar to English-speaking readers and is recommended for academic and public libraries. Y. Jehenson; SUNY College at Oswego
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This collection of traditional and experimental stories by Argentinian novelist Bioy Casares ( The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata ) offers sophisticated, seamless prose, as well as magical realism and biting political satire. His characters are motivated by lust, avarice and vanity but elicit sympathy because of their vulnerability. In the title story, a fortune hunter joins an ecological expedition in pursuit of a millionaire's daughter; but the father is swallowed by an enormous pollution-feeding caterpillar, and when the daughter takes over her father's factory, she renounces her former ecological stance. In another story, a notary public recovering from hepatitis stays near a lake and meets Doctor Salmon's niece, who asks him to prove his love for her by letting her uncle transform them both into fish. Many of the stories are fantasies, often centering on shocking events--an actor is shot by supporters of a dictatorship for playing a republican who cries, ``Oh liberty!'' and an angelic-looking girl breakfasts on her parents after being given an appetite stimulant. Throughout Casares surprises and entertains in these suspenseful stories. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This collection of seven stories by the Argentinean author and protege of Borges exhibits many elements reminiscent of his mentor's style. The title story, ``A Russian Doll,'' reveals the unexpected fate of a man who allows himself to be engulfed by greed in pursuit of a wealthy heiress at odds with her father. Like Russian nesting dolls, the characters in this and in the other stories reveal hidden motives and submerged existences when their surfaces are peeled away. Most of the stories contain surrealistic elements, yet Casares also tackles serious issues such as censorship of artistic expression in a repressive society (``Cato'') and prejudice (``The Navigator Returns to His Country''). Although the author's work has been translated previously, he has not yet gained wide recognition in the United States, and he merits greater attention. This representative collection will be of interest to academic and public libraries.--Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Bioy Casares (The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata, 1989; The Dream of Heroes, 1988, etc.)--once a collaborator with his fellow Argentine Borges--is a gently funny writer who in his short stories gives play to an entertaining surrealism and talent for disexpectation. He has an unerring talent for genre, too: the travel diary (``Our Trip [A Diary]''--in which the whimsy comes more from a cast of different imaginary female companions than from the sights seen) or the shaggy-dog-story-form (the title story, or ``A Meeting in Rauch,'' or ``Underwater''--in which great surprises are in store for a traveller who finds himself operating in someone else's fantastic context) or the simple anecdote (``Regarding A Smell''). Continually inventive throughout--though occasionally a little overblown and toying--and therefore the cumulative effect of this quite small book is very pleasant.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
