Bioy Casares's novels and short stories are comic master-pieces whose fundamental joke is the gap that separates what his characters know from what is going on. The most notorious victim of that gap is the narrator of La invención de Morel, who frequently attempts to declare his love for one Faustine without realizing that she is a sort of holographic image who cannot therefore perceive his presence. Yet even the most trite situations that occur in Bioy's work contain the same fundamental dilemma. Thus his sex comedies in Guirnalda con amores or El gran serafin depict situations in which a man is convinced he has achieved a spectacular success only to discover that the girl's motives were notoriously less flattering than he imagined them to be. (p. 247)

Bioy Casares imposes upon his characters an adventure, whether plausible or fantastic, in order to reveal their comic puniness.

Traditional...