Details

ISBN-10: 1945492856
ISBN-13: 9781945492853
Publisher: Transit Books
Publish Date: 05/07/2024
Dimensions: 7.90" L, 5.20" W, 0.70" H

The Novices of Lerna

Translator: Jordan Landsman

Paperback

Price: $17.95

Overview

The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English readers for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient.

The collection’s central novella follows Ramón Beltra, an unambitious scholar who receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. After he reluctantly complies with the unusual qualifying paperwork requiring several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body, Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other “novices” subject to the same undisclosed project–all of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school’s dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one…

An overlooked master of Argentine fantastic literature, Ángel Bonomini garnered praise among peers and contemporaries like Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, before slipping mysteriously into obscurity. Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, Bonomini was forty-three years old in 1972 when he published The Novices of Lerna, the first of four books of short stories he released before his death at age sixty-four.

Read More
Reviews
"I'm so enthralled by the book that one night, when Borges came over, I proposed we read the only story I hadn't read yet: "The Novices of Lerna." We were dazzled. The story is admirably told, with much wisdom, everything is spot on, from the pleasantly calm tone to the description and ambience of the setting."–letter from Adolfo Bioy Casares to Ángel Bonomini, September 18, 1972

"These surreal stories reckon with identity, perception, and existence... A beguiling blend of the cerebral and the visceral."–Kirkus Reviews

"[Bonomini] makes a noteworthy English-language debut with this entrancing collection."–Publishers Weekly

"[The Novices of Lerna] is a ghost of a book that haunts and perplexes, enticing each reader in with its mastery of language and craft."–Asymptote

"Bonomini's fantastic collection [allows] the worlds of his stories to slither out and off the page, offer forbidden fruit, and shoot readers into a fallen and forgotten world where the real is absurd and the absurd is really the most true thing on offer."–The Rumpus

"...the mirror house of Bonomini's collection throws up a multiplicity of reflections–not always flattering, but always revelatory."Ancillary Review of Books

More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10: 1945492856
ISBN-13: 9781945492853
Publisher: Transit Books
Publish Date: 05/07/2024
Dimensions: 7.90" L, 5.20" W, 0.70" H
Skip to content