The protagonists of Exotic Birds: Five Stories with Rare Women can seem a bit "rare" or strange to those who expect them to behave according to society's accepted standards. They are rare, above all, because they live like foreigners even in their own countries and in the bosom of their own families; rare because reality, that alienating external world, derails them. Like a spiral woven around two axes-a trip and a truncated novel-The Reef captures the insecurities of a time of terror, that of the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983. But times and spaces are ambiguous as are the...