The dream of heroes

Fülszöveg

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 Dream 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... Tovább

Fülszöveg

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 Dream 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. The great Borges himself much admired this staccato, cinematic fiction of Argentinian selffashioning and you can see why. The real streets, neighbourhoods, cinemas, trams and taverns of Buenos Aires, a modernist cosmopolis in which Ibsen is being thrillingly played for bohemian connoisseurs, merge cunningly into a spooky replay of Oedipus and Eurydice, a magic lantern business of prophecy and curse and archaically hellish fatalism aboard the enigmatic streetcars of South American male desire. A very fetching mix indeed, canny and labyrinthine.' -The Observer Review Vissza