Anomie in a Shifting Reality : A PLAN FOR ESCAPE <i> By Adolfo Bioy-Casares translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (Graywolf Press: $7.50, paper; 116 pp.) </i>

Adolfo Bioy-Casares’ choice of point of view is brilliant: He filters experiences through the guarded speculations of someone who hasn’t participated in them. Juxtaposed with excerpts of an exiled Frenchman’s letters are narrative passages from his uncle who tries to make sense of the letters while freeing himself from any sense of responsibility for his nephew’s bizarre fate. From the first page of his cryptic novel, “A Plan for Escape,” Bioy-Casares challenges his readers to question the reliability of this narrator.

First published in 1945, the book explores the decline and corruption of the individual trapped within a machine of violence. Bioy-Casares draws parallels to the atrocities of Nazi Germany in his treatment of horror and confusion, conspiracy and fear. As his characters attempt to endure or overcome a corrupt system that is secretive about its ever-changing rules, they are weakened or contaminated. Hallucinations, misinterpretations and paranoia lead them into irrational acts, but these acts don’t matter nearly as much as the increasing disorientation that arises from them.

A spoiled young Frenchman, Henri Nevers, is exiled to a group of camouflaged islands off French Guiana to assist a governor who believes that his operation is regulated by a unique order. Nevers, who always considered it absurd to “meddle in things that had already happened,” is disturbed by rumors of mysterious experiments with prisoners in this world in which its inhabitants are “dreaming that we dream.” The prisoners are conditioned to imagine their world “vividly, obsessively” and are kept in isolation “so that the obsession would remain pure.”

As the characters manipulate each others’ reality, they move within a nightmarish landscape where it’s not always clear who the enemy is, and where the power structure can change at any moment. “The governor was sure of participating in the dream of the islands that he infused in others; but he was afraid of losing forever our vision of reality.”

Kept awake by his fear of insomnia, Nevers plots to get off the islands. He wants to believe that his “stay in the Guianas was merely an episode in my life. Time would erase it, as it did other dreams.” Instead, he becomes obsessed with the secrets and sheds his passivity by setting out on an obscure, self-imposed mission that includes a false confession, intrigue and forged identities. But perhaps he is not gaining a new independence; perhaps he is merely playing his part within the governor’s dream machine. “He found himself before a growing conglomeration of mysteries. Were they independent of each other? Or were they linked; did they form a system, perhaps still incomplete?”

Born in Argentina, Adolfo Bioy-Casares is well known as Jorge Luis Borges’ collaborator and friend. His numerous works, including novels, film scripts and short stories, have been translated into many languages. “A Plan for Escape,” like some of his previous works, explores the disintegration of communication within an ever-shifting reality.