SOURCE: "Anomie in a Shifting Reality," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 23, 1990, p. 12.

Hegi is a German-born American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following review of A Plan for Escape, she comments on Bioy Casares's focus on communication and reality.

Adolfo Bioy-Casares' choice of point of view [in A Plan for Escape] is brilliant: He filters experiences through the guarded speculations of someone who hasn't participated in them. Juxtaposed with excerpts of an exiled Frenchman's letters are narrative passages from his uncle who tries to make sense of the letters while freeing himself from any sense of responsibility for his nephew's bizarre fate. From the first page of his cryptic novel, A Plan for Escape, Bioy-Casares challenges his readers to question the reliability of this narrator.

First published in 1945, the book explores the decline and corruption of the individual trapped within a machine of violence. Bioy-Casares...