Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer takes place in the new “free market” era of personal choices and relations: a chaotic, sometimes hopeful, often comic world that has supplanted the old order of political terror and clearly demarcated ideological divides. The novel’s vaudeville qualities, with characters shuffling on and off the page in rapid succession, are complemented by its exhilarating air of parody. Dreams draws ingeniously upon the sentimentality and ephemera of popular culture—quoting radio and TV shows, song lyrics, newspaper items, and bits of gossip— while also offering a sterner, more nuanced view of public and private relations. It is in large measure this mix of elements—“popular” and “high” culture, sentimentality and political understanding, vaudeville and arch satire—that makes Dreams an exemplary postmodern novel.

Alicia Borinsky received the 1996 Latino Literature Award, given by the Institute of Latin American Writers, for Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer. Borinsky’s Mean Woman was published in Cola Franzen’s translation by the University of Nebraska Press in 1993. Borinsky is a professor of Latin American and comparative literature at Boston University. Cola Franzen is a writer and independent translator.

"Desire, the city, and the limits of language are the subjects. Transfiguring their music into vaudeville, Alicia Borinsky . . . unleashes one of the most delirious novels in Latin American literature."—Tomás Eloy Martínez, author of Santa Evita