A Russian Doll and Other Stories.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

In the world of Bioy Casares people are unique yet duplicable, the line between individuals and even species is blurry, and God appears in the most unexpected places. Originally published in Spanish in 1991 as Una muneca rusa, this new collection of seven stories is vintage Bioy Casares: the fantastic goes hand-in-hand with the mundane and the dead serious with the deadpan.

Like much of Bioy Casares' fiction, many of the stories in A Russian Doll involve travel, for it is the author's belief that travel liberates the spirit, allowing it to accept bizarre new experiences. In the title story, an Argentine traveler runs into an old friend in a less-than-elegant hotel in Aix. An admitted fortune-hunter, the friend recounts the bizarre story of his efforts to woo the daughter of a rich factory owner. At the beginning of his adventure, he visits the surprisingly well appointed apartments of the hotel owner, a widow who offers to lend him her late husband's dinner jacket. While there, a Russian doll catches his eye. The widow explains what everyone knows about Russian dolls: they are arranged by size, one inside the other, so that "when one breaks, the others are left." The significance of this seemingly superfluous observation is not obvious until the end, when the wooer's greed leads him to make some bad decisions in terms of his long-range plans. Fortunately for him, when the biggest, most beautiful "doll" is gone, another one is left to take its place--and he is perfectly happy to settle for second best.

In "Our Trip (A Diary)" Bioy Casares treats the same subject from a different perspective. The story consists of a series of fragments from a travel diary, each of which recounts episodes from the demise of a marriage. In every scene, the location and the woman's name are different. Here, as in "A Russian Doll," women are interchangeable and therefore expendable. The misogynistic undertones of these stories is undeniable, but Bioy Casares' real focus is the universality and duplicability of human experience. No matter where or who they are, men and women face certain obstacles to communication that undermine their relationships.

Communication is also one of the main themes of "Underwater," but here Bioy Casares makes his point through surrealistic imagery. Aldo Martelli is a very ordinary notary public whose main interests are his health and fishing...