A satire, then, on the 20th century idee fixe that ail revolutionary movements in the arts require a total bouleversement of the naturalistic tradition of reality, hi the broader comic moments, we sense the hand of Bioy-Casares at work, but the details of each aesthetic novelty which suggest that indeed neither reality nor its imitation is what it may seem to be, harken back to Borges' pervasively influential ficciones. A critic of no talent and less taste, he writes virtually the same critique of every con artist in Buenos Aires-so-and-so has created ""pure art,"" so-and-so is the ""new wave,"" so-and-so is the embodiment of ""totum revolutum."" The authors set forth an entire fictional world of gibberish-writing poets, creative plagiarists, painters without paintings, constructors of nonhabitable architecture, playwrights who interpret ""all the world's a stage"" as a dictum to abandon theater. Bustos Domecq, is a literary hack and pompous ass of the highest order. Half the fun of this new collaboration between the internationally renowned metaphysical trickster and his compatriot, the artist of bald-faced lying, is isolating the threads of each wickedly devious mind.
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