[An American author and critic, Morris has published novels, short stories, and travel pieces. In the following mixed review, she asserts that the theme of fate in The Dream of Heroes is more befitting a short story or parable than a novel.]

In The Dream of Heroes, Taboada—secret protector and father-in-law of Emilio Gauna—speaks these dying words, intended for his son-in-law: "I should like to explain to him that there is generosity in happiness and selfishness in adventure." Written in 1954, and translated now for the first time, this is a novel about the choice which is most often the domain of men, especially in Latin culture, between domestic contentment and unbridied thrills. In the case of Emilio Gauna it is the tension in his life between bliss with Clara, the woman he loves, and an obsessive desire to know what happened to him on the third night of the Carnival in buenos Aires in 1927.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was both friend of and collaborator with Jorge Luis Borges. Borges referred to him as "really and secretly the master." Like Borges, Mr. Bioy Casares is interested in the secrets and mysteries, the labyrinths and philosophical perplexities of life. In The Dream of Heroes, under the guise of an adventure-mystery novel—complete with Carnival, masked women, dark woods, inexplicable events and alcoholic stupors—Mr. Bioy Casares recounts a kind of metaphysical fairy tale in which the hero, caught between good and evil, enters upon a doomed search for self.

On the third night of the Carnival something happened to Emilio Gauna. He was out drinking with his wild, raucous friends when he encountered a masked woman. Hours later, he awakened on the shores of a lake, disoriented and terror-stricken. What happened to him that night remains his single preoccupation and the central plot line of the novel. No matter what turns his life takes, including falling in love and marrying Clara, Taboada's daughter, Gauna cannot rest until he finds out who was the masked woman and what happened to him that night near the lake. Like Oedipus, Gauna has a date with destiny; like Oedipus it is his own thirst for knowledge that drives him to his fate.

On its surface this is a detective novel, that genre which Borges praised many times—including in the preface to Mr. Bioy Casares' 1940 collection of short stories, The Invention of Morel—as preferable to the "plotless" psychological novels of such writers as Balzac, Proust or the 19th-century Russian novelists. As in all detective novels, we have here a suspicion of wrongdoing, a search and ultimately a crime. On another level, despite its anti-psychological bent, the novel is also about a kind of fixated stage of development. Emilio is unable to relinquish his selfish, adolescent thirst for adventure in exchange for mature, adult happiness with Clara. And finally in philosophical terms, as with the metaphysical tales of Borges, there is the journey into the labyrinth of self—the theme here being that the thing you are seeking is the thing you have; in seeking it you destroy it, along with yourself.

The Dream of Heroes was written 30 years ago, well before the boom in Latin American literature when the great novels of writers such as García Márquez, Donoso, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa were written. Rather than being a kind of precursor of the magical realism their works represent, it has greater affinity with the French nouveau roman, particularly the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Indeed it is a kind of cross between a Borges story and a Robbe-Grillet novel.

As such the novel lacks what we have come to expect from Latin American writers—a rich complexity of character and event, a deep connection to a place and a certain power of language. At the same time it does not have the narrative conciseness, the sharp writing and the assured voice one finds in the stories of Borges, as well as in Mr. Bioy Casares' own short stories in The Invention of Morel.

In particular, Emilio Gauna, the hero, falls flat. What moves him is unclear. It is as if he had no life before the third night of the Carnival. While this might work in a short story, it feels here as if we are missing some of the pieces. For example, we know he is an orphan, but we know nothing about his parents or their death. We wonder why, when he meets and falls in love with Clara, the masked woman does not recede into memory. We also wonder why Clara, who holds the key, doesn't just reveal the secret to him and thereby save the man she loves.

The answer is because it's a story about destiny and fate and inevitability. In this sense it reminded me of that wonderful Sufi tale about meeting death in the market place. And as a tale it might have succeeded. But as a novel, it needs more to carry it along, particularly in the middle sections when life with Clara takes precedence over what happened at the Carnival.

Instead this novel reads more like the description it gives of Love Never Dies, a film Emilio goes to see: "It was a long saga of romantic love that continued beyond the grave with beautiful young girls and noble, disinterested young men…. There were exaggeratedly good characters and exaggeratedly wicked ones and a sort of frenzy of misfortune." The good, such as Clara, are too good to be engaging and the evil too obvious to be surprising, and Emilio Gauna is more an allegorical hero with a tragic flaw than a flesh-and-blood character with human complexity. His trail of misfortunes seems more the stuff of pat fairy tales than that extended dream we have come to call the novel.