Mémoire des Apparences

Ruiz at his densest and most oblique. Ostensibly a version of Calderón's Spanish Golden Age drama Life Is a Dream, it starts as a psychological detective story about a former Resistance fighter attempting to reconstitute the play and the details it conceals about an underground resistance network. Despairing, he ends up hanging around the local cinema, which doubles as a police station, as well as a playground for the excesses of memory and the imagination. The most explicitly dreamlike of Ruiz's fictions, with Magritte and Borges allusions foremost, it's also a good example of his tendency to overstate, to booby-trap his fictions with more false bottoms than the conscious mind can properly assimilate. But bearing in mind that sleep forms the main agenda here, you're probably safe to doze off from time to time.