[A] brand of haunted American maleness preoccupies Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Dream of Heroes. Casares's people are residents of Buenos Aires, bar-flies, football fanatics, addicts of cards, booze and betting on the races, the kind of men who settle differences with bottles and knives, awesomely tangled in the values of gaucho and tango. Central among them is mechanic Emilio Gauna whose fancied horse comes good at Carnival time in 1927 and who treats his chums to a great binge during which there take place some very odd and only hazily recalled encounters with an intriguingly masked girl.

Gauna marries an actress, daughter of a sorcerer, and eases up on nights out with the lads. But he remains troubled by that strangely soured Carnival experience. And in 1930, lucky once more at Carnival, he re-enacts the earlier happenings to plumb the mystery of the masked girl.

The great Borges himself much admired this staccato, cinematic fiction of Argentinian self-fashioning (it first appeared in 1954) and you can see why. The real streets, neighbourhoods, cinemas, trams and taverns of Buenos Aires, a modernist cosmopolis in which Ibsen is being thrillingly acted for bohemian connoisseurs, merge cunningly into a spooky replay of Orpheus and Eurydice, a magic lantern business of prophecy and curse and archaically hellish fatalism aboard the enigmatic streetcars of South American male desire. It's a very fetching mix indeed, canny and labyrinthine—and only 33 years late in English translation.