SOURCE: "In the Soul Trade," in Newsweek, Vol. XCII, No. 22, November 27, 1978, p. 108.

Prescott is an American critic, educator, and prominent journalist. His Soundings: Encounters with Contemporary Books (1972) examines several books published in the mid-1960s through early 1970s. In the following review, he offers a highly negative assessment of Asleep in the Sun.

[Asleep in the Sun is] a further impediment to our understanding of Latin American civilization. Adolfo Bioy Casares, a prominent Argentine novelist and sometime collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, has written what I can only describe as a fussy horror story with a science-fiction twist at the end. That he has allegorical ambitions is evident, but his precise intention is (to Northern eyes, at least) unfathomable, and the resulting muddle is less interesting than it might be.

Bioy Casares doesn't help matters by choosing a hackneyed form of narration: his story is told by an...