[Prescott is an American critic, educator, and prominent journalist. His Soundings: Encounters with Contemporary Books (1972) examines several books published in the mid-1960s through early 1970s. In the following review, he offers a highly negative assessment of Asleep in the Sun.]

[Asleep in the Sun is] a further impediment to our understanding of Latin American civilization. Adolfo Bioy Casares, a prominent Argentine novelist and sometime collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, has written what I can only describe as a fussy horror story with a science-fiction twist at the end. That he has allegorical ambitions is evident, but his precise intention is (to Northern eyes, at least) unfathomable, and the resulting muddle is less interesting than it might be.

Bioy Casares doesn't help matters by choosing a hackneyed form of narration: his story is told by an inmate of a lunatic asylum. Lucio is a humble man, bedeviled by his relatives and redeemed only by his love for his wife, Diana, who like most of us is mildly neurotic. A man of infinite pliability, Lucio allows himself to be persuaded to commit Diana to an asylum. She returns cured, seemingly the perfect wife, yet Lucio is still troubled. Diana is not only a better woman, she is a different woman; when Lucio looks deeply into her lovely eyes he cannot find the person he once knew. Diana's ominous psychiatrist tells Lucio that the problem is his; Lucio's own imperfections make him incompatible with his perfected spouse. As if to press his point, the doctor abducts Lucio, promising to do for him what he did for Diana, and Lucio is left to scribble his narrative on smuggled sheets of paper.

If the story so far sounds compact, I can only protest that the author takes a long, embroidered time arriving at the point where he begins to be interesting. Lucio is such a helpless ninny, and his conversations so unremittingly dull, that by the time the drama comes in a fine flurry of foolishness I found it hard to care. The doctor, it seems, has been engaged in experiments in metempsychosis: he transfers sick souls from human bodies to dog bodies and replaces them with healthy souls from deteriorating human bodies. And what shall we make of this? That we imperfect creatures cannot love perfection? That a totalitarian state will not shrink from remodeling humanity to its taste? Damned if I know; I only wish that Bioy Casares had written a story that was sufficiently tense, or sufficiently intriguing, to provoke concern from his readers. The Island of Dr. Moreau this is not, nor even The Stepford Wives.