I started reading Fever Dream at about 1:30am this morning and didn't stop until I was done. I should have been sleeping of course, but the story and more importantly structure and voice of this compact, devastating story wouldn't let me go. I'm not sure when the last time I was so gripped by any book was, when I read anything so claustrophobically tense, or any so effective a horror story. 
 Because, in essence, that's what this is, though it's not genre fiction. It's an unsettling, unique work more in line (in the Argentine fantastic tradition) with the more disorienting and eerily suggestive stories of Ocampo or Cortazar. But the feeling of the book -- the bleak impenetrable intensity -- is more reminiscent of one of my favorite Duras novels, L'Amante anglaise. Both stories attain their effect through a similar structure: both unfold entirely as dialogue, in both something terrible has happened that the reader, as with the interlocutors, is desperate to approach. That intense need to get to the heart of something unfathomable, the struggle to find a path of approach to disaster, is what forced me to read Fever Dream straight through to the end as I did. 
 In synopsis, or straight narrative action, the story would be but a shade of itself. It's the form that makes this work. The story unfolds in parallel layers. In the ostensible present, a women floats in a void of unseeing malady, in an infirmary, telling her story to a boy, her sole stimulus, who is determined to guide her to 'the most important thing', the thing, presumably which brought her here. Soon she gets lost in the parallel present of the events of a couple days before, with their own embedded stories, each layer interleaving with the others in a delicate, morbid dance. By the end, we've moved further, into other layers, in both directions. The novel arises not from the supposed facts of the 'story' (if such may be assumed to concretely exist), but in this deft dance around them, teasing at them for horrible meaning from every side. Critically, it's a slow constant process, a drifting unease. There's no sudden twist or reveal designed to upend the reader. Much better, the entire experience is an upending process.