The first of the great works by an essential author, considered by Mario Vargas Llosa as the first modern Latin American novel. Eladio Linacero, an existential antihero, is run down by his realization of the degeneration of human existence and the uselessness of all attempts at communication. He tries to free himself from his daily tedium through fiction& Writing about a dream set in Canada is the escape route that lets him construct a new reality of his own design, as the protagonist attempts to “do something different. Something better than the things that happened to me. I would like to write the story of an unfettered soul, without the circumstances which ended up ensnaring him.”