[An American critic, Balderston is the author of Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges (1993) and The Latin American Short Story: An Annotated Guide to Anthologies and Criticism (1992). In the following excerpt, he discusses Bioy Casares's approach to the fantastic in A Russian Doll, and Other Stories, noting how he imitates the work of his former collaborators, Jorge Luis Borges and Argentine fiction writer Silvina Ocampo.]

In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Jorge Luis Borges's great story of the creation of an encyclopedia about an imaginary planet, everything begins with a conversation between Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares about the possibility of a work of fiction in which the presence of minute contradictions would permit a few readers to discover a disquieting plot quite different from the apparent one. The story was published in 1940, the year in which Mr. Bioy Casares published his first major novel, The Invention of Morel, with a plot pronounced "perfect" by Borges in his review of it, and also the year that Borges and Mr. Bioy Casares—together with Silvina Ocampo, Mr. Bioy Casares's wife and herself a major writer—published an anthology of fantastic literature (recently issued in English as A Book of Fantasy) that changed the course of Latin American literature.

A half century later, The Invention of Morel has inspired a disquieting parable of totalitarian power, Eliseo Subiela's film Man Facing Southeast. Mr. Bioy Casares, by now the author of a number of other significant books including A Plan for Escape, The Dream of Heroes and The Diary of the Year of the Pig, has stayed faithful to the task of unsettling the reader with understated works of fiction in which some details don't quite fit, in which something is not quite right. His latest book, A Russian Doll: And Other Stories, continues his quest to present a contemporary reality distorted by elements of the fantastic and the grotesque.

Two stories in the collection, "A Russian Doll" and "Underwater," invite the reader to take a look at what the interventions of modern science have done to life under water. In one, an Argentine visitor to Aix-les-Bains in France encounters an old acquaintance, Maceira, who (inspired by the movies) has come to the spa to look for an heiress to marry; the ensuing complications turn out to be more than the gold digger bargained for. The story resembles one of Kafka's in that the extraordinary happenings disrupt a dull and rather dreary reality; the fantastic events, however, grow out of an apocalyptic series of ecological catastrophes.

This contemporary flavor also informs "Underwater," in which a story of unrequited love turns into a tale of horror, again because of scientific meddling with the natural environment.

One of the most impressive stories, "The Navigator Returns to His Country," is also the briefest in the collection, and the least like Mr. Bioy Casares's other work. Here an employee at a South American embassy in Paris discovers an unexpected likeness between himself and a disheveled Cambodian student on the subway. The dream sequence in the story is brief and beautifully understated, serving to underscore the pain of both foreigners' waking reality.

This collection also contains some understated homages to two of the closest associates of Mr. Bioy Casares. "A Meeting in Rauch" is strongly reminiscent of the stories in Borges's 1975 collection, The Book of Sand, down to the bookish reference to Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, a treatise on the world of spirits, that provides the idea for the metaphysical conceit in the story and even the name of the protagonist (Swerberg). More surprising, given the extreme differences in tone between their earlier writings, are Mr. Bioy Casares's quiet homages to Silvina Ocampo. "Our Trip (A Diary)" and the final "Three Fantasies in Minor Key" sound and feel like Ms. Ocampo, though perhaps the black humor and the violence are not so intense as in her own writing (a selection of her stories, Leopoldina's Dream, is available in English).

It is surprising to see Mr. Bioy Casares imitating Borges and Ms. Ocampo so late in his career. No doubt Mr. Bioy Casares began his career as a writer imitating Borges, but the imitation of Ms. Ocampo (considered by many a stronger writer than her husband) is new and unexpected….

In the last two or three years Adolfo Bioy Casares has won a number of important awards, including Spain's coveted Cervantes Prize, and his work has been discovered by a new generation of readers across the Spanish-speaking world. His writing is not marked by the excess that many North American readers associate with Latin American writing; his brand of the fantastic is never disconnected from reality, and he is always attentive to the cadences—and the commonplaces—of everyday speech. One can only hope that the charms of this little collection will entice readers to discover—or rediscover—his earlier work, particularly The Invention of Morel and The Dream of Heroes.