[In the following review, Levin favorably comments on Diary of the War of the Pig.]

[In Diary of the War of the Pig a senior citizen] of Buenos Aires, Isidro Vidal, realizes one day that his old friends are being massacred. One by one, the companions of his nightly card game are clubbed to death, shot, pitched off the bleachers of a football stadium, flung into bonfires. Nor is the slaughter restricted to Isidro's cafe cronies alone. An old peoples' home is bombed, and the elderly everywhere are waylaid.

What links the violence is that it is committed on the old by the young. The motive? Well you might ask. A physician in the novel explains that the young feel a neurotic "repulsion" toward the old. A youth suggests that killing the elderly is a way of expunging the past. The idea is circulated that "old people are greedy, selfish, materialistic, and eternally grumbling, real hogs." And one Golden-Ager concludes that the young don't need "good reasons" to murder the old. "Just the ones they happen to have are enough."

Mr. Casares, a popular Argentinian writer and a collaborator of Luis Borges, takes an existential rather than a moral attitude. Unlike Lord of the Files, which is a soluble parable, this hypnotic novel conjures up a Kafka-like nightmare each reader may interpret as he likes: an affirmation of life, of bestiality or of love. It's all there, bubbling in rich profusion.