THE ADVENTURES OF A PHOTOGRAPHER IN LA PLATA<i> by Adolfo Bioy Casares Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (E.P. Dutton: $18.95; 167 pp.) </i>

The reader of a novel is like a young man from the provinces who arrives in the big city gawking, suitcase in hand. What adventures will befall him? Romance? A mugging? The main thing is that they start soon. The veteran Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, best known for “The Dream of Heroes” and his collaborations with Borges, doesn’t disappoint. He begins: “Around five in the morning, after a bus trip as long as the night, Nicolasito Almanza arrived in La Plata. He had barely walked a block . . . when somebody waved to him.”

And not just any somebody. Don Juan Lombardo, the old gentleman who detains him, is the spark that sets in motion a storytelling engine of near-perfect efficiency. In this short novel, no time is wasted, no character or detail superfluous, no remark without its point. Yet this very perfection makes the novel seem faintly stylized, its age-old devices--coincidental meetings, delayed paychecks, midnight trysts, nosy landladies--at odds with the contemporary, sexy story being told. Bioy Casares’ lucid prose might as well be the misty, shifting light of La Plata that blurs the buildings Almanza photographs; the effect is of near-total ambiguity.

The young man is a novice, but his photographs have a magical effect on all who see them. He is poor and diffident but rapidly attracts friends and lovers. Don Juan may be a harmless eccentric, but he may also be a swindler, a vampire, even the devil. His two daughters, Julia and Griselda, both of whom the lusty Almanza beds, present interchangeable faces of love. The photographer’s friend Mascardi, a cop, may be informing on other friends who are student radicals. Reality and dream, common sense and paranoia, flip-flop. Almanza survives what may be a murder attempt because he has picked up a few city tricks--and because he has remained as sweet-natured and guileless as Candide.

“The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata,” like much other Latin American literature, gives the impression of a culture both younger and older, raunchier and more sophisticated, than our own: a blend of Europe and the wild frontier. In Bioy Casares, who is 74, the sophistication predominates. Though jacket blurbs tout his “magical existentialism,” our reader needn’t fear that heavy metaphysical baggage will weigh down his suitcase. Rather, it’s like the fizz of electricity above the trolley that carries him effortlessly down new and exotic streets.