El sueno de los heroes / Dream of Heroes

Ambientada en los años treinta en una Buenos Aires fantasmal, El sueño de los héroes parte de la juerga que se dan Emilio Gauna y sus amigos durante tres noches de carnaval por los suburbios de la ciudad. Nada debería ser más mundano, pero al recordarla Gauna se convence de que en la última noche vivió «una prodigiosa aventura'. Cuando intente repetirla tres años más tarde, el sueño de una revelación se convertirá en un enfrentamiento con su destino.

Desde su publicación en 1954, este clásico de la literatura argentina no ha dejado de fascinar a los lectores con su intrigante mezcla de lo fantástico y lo cotidiano.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

At the end of carnival 1927, Emilio Gauna had an experience that he knew was the culmination of his life. The problem is that Gauna can only dimly remember what happened: he was out on the town with his raucous, reckless friends when a masked woman appeared. Several hours later, gasping and horrified, Gauna awoke at the edge of a lake. Three years later, he tries to solve the mystery the only way he knows: by re-creating the same situation and reliving it- despite the warnings of his secret protector, the Sorcerer.

In The Dreams of Heroes, Adolfo Bioy Casares assembles magicians, prophetic and brave women, shamefully self-conscious men and Buenos Aires under the rubric of a sinister and mocking fate, and thrusts them forward into the dizzying realm of memory, doom and cyclical time. Written in 1954, The Dream of Heroes stands as a predecessor of and model for a whole school of European and American novels that followed but never quite matched it.