This is a quasi-surrealist fable set on Devil's Island shortly after the Dreyfus affair. Bioys-Casares seems to have many of the same obsessions as his compatriot and contemporary Jorge Luis Borges: the unreliability and malleability of the senses, the possibility of inventing new worlds simply by thinking them so. In other words, applied Schopenhauer. It's all very unsatisfying.
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