The Dream of Heroes

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Dutton, 1988 - Fiction - 212 pages
"At the end of carnival 1927, Emilio Gauna had an experience that he knew was the culmination of his life. The problem is that Gauna can only dimly remember what happened: he was out on the town with his raucous, reckless friends when a masked woman appeared. Several hours later, gasping and horrified, Gauna awoke at the edge of a lake. Three years later, he tries to solve the mystery the only way he knows: by re-creating the same situation and reliving it- despite the warnings of his secret protector, the Sorcerer. In The Dreams of Heroes, Adolfo Bioy Casares assembles magicians, prophetic and brave women, shamefully self-conscious men and Buenos Aires under the rubric of a sinister and mocking fate, and thrusts them forward into the dizzying realm of memory, doom and cyclical time. Written in 1954 and never before published in America, The Dream of Heroes stands as a predecessor of and model for a whole school of European and American novels that followed but never quite matched it"--

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About the author (1988)

Adolfo Bioy Casares has collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges on a number of works. They compiled Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), a documentation of the development of Spanish American suprarealism, and Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1981), a playful and inventive variation on the theme of the detective who cannot visit the scene of the crime. Bioy Casares's numerous works are characterized by intelligence and a sense of playful fantasy. The Invention of Morel (1953), concerns a scientist's illusions about immortality. Asleep in the Sun is a bizarre tale written in an epistolary form. Ultimately the recipient of the letter is left to wonder whether, in fact, the puzzle has any solution or whether, like much of Bioy Casares's and Borges's work, it is an inside joke between author and reader.

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