SOURCE: A review of Asleep in the Sun, in World Literature Today, Vol. 54, No. 1, Winter, 1980, p. 83.

In the following excerpt, Lewis comments favorably on Asleep in the Sun.

Adolfo Bioy Casares first came to the attention of the English-reading public as a collaborator with Jorge Luis Borges in such works as Extraordinary Tales and Chronicles of Bustos Domecq. Since that time—the early 1970s—he has risen to prominence as a literary figure apart from Borges. His importance, however, does not nearly equal that of Borges, although he should not for that reason be passed over without consideration.

Asleep in the Sun, Bioy Casares's fifth novel published in Spanish (1973), begins as a story of bourgeois domestic mediocrity but soon turns into an account of a bizarre form of psychiatric treatment. The wife of the protagonist Bordenave returns from Dr. Reger Samaniego's Phrenopathic Institute so altered in personality—so...