Adolfo Bioy Casares - 'The Dream Of Heroes'

It was a few years ago when I first read Jorge Luis Borges' 'Book of Imaginary Beings'. I came to it in a roundabout way as is so often the case, through China Miéville's novella 'The Tain' which, I learned, draws influence from the former. I followed 'the Fish of The Mirror' back along the labyrinthine spiderweb of ideas that connects every writer to every other and struck gold. Soon after that I became utterly enraptured by Borges' writings and still continue to be.

It was in a similar way that I came upon Adolfo Bioy Casares. It was only upon reading Richard Burgin's 'Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges' that I first heard of the relatively unknown Argentine writer. He was a contemporary and friend of Borges and I took there to be no greater recommendation than his association with the author.

'The Dream Of Heroes' is the second book I've read by Bioy Casares after the enjoyable 'Asleep In The Sun' and over a week after finishing it I find it still bubbles up in my mind during quiet moments.

The novel concerns Emilio Gauna, a young mechanic in Buenos Aires who runs with a gang of other wayward youths headed by the menacing Dr Valerga. The story follows his attempts to recover the events of three drunken days and nights during the 1927 carnival.

On the back cover of the book there is this quote from the text, something said by the sorceror Taboada:

"You went on a kind of journey and now you are full of a sense of loss like Ulysses back from Ithaca or Jason remembering the golden apples... That journey (since we have to call it something) was neither entirely good nor entirely evil. For your own sake and that of others, do not repeat the journey. It is a beautiful memory and memory is life. Do not destroy it."

This extract encapsulates the novel: a vivid exploration of the bittersweet adventures of youth, of how we come to venerate these memories in later years, the effect this veneration has upon our psyche and subsequently upon our lives, and ultimately what may happen if we allow our wistful reminiscence to gain too strong a grip. It is a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever been young and acted foolishly, anyone who has gone on 'an adventure', and anyone who has ever remembered and longed to repeat things now far gone and better left that way.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was a powerful writer, one who understood the capacity of the human animal, with its irrepressible, irrational wants and needs, to pursue unwittingly its own destruction. I was lucky to pick up a hard-back edition of this out-of-print novel in such good condition and will treasure it for years to come.