SOURCE: "Fantastic Voyages," in The New York Times Book Review, November 29, 1992, p. 15.

An American critic, Balderston is the author of Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges (1993) and The Latin American Short Story: An Annotated Guide to Anthologies and Criticism (1992). In the following excerpt, he discusses Bioy Casares's approach to the fantastic in A Russian Doll, and Other Stories, noting how he imitates the work of his former collaborators, Jorge Luis Borges and Argentine fiction writer Silvina Ocampo.

In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Jorge Luis Borges's great story of the creation of an encyclopedia about an imaginary planet, everything begins with a conversation between Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares about the possibility of a work of fiction in which the presence of minute contradictions would permit a few readers to discover a disquieting plot quite different from the apparent one. The story...