
The Novices of Lerna
Jordan Landsman
(Translator)Description
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.
Product Details
Publisher | Transit Books |
Publish Date | May 07, 2024 |
Pages | 200 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781945492853 |
Dimensions | 7.9 X 5.2 X 0.7 inches | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"Bonomini's imagination has a watercolor lightness that sets him apart from his contemporaries."--Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books
"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
"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
"One of the truest depictions of dissociation and dysphoria I've read anywhere, all filtered through the strangeness of seeing oneself in the third person, refracted again and again."--Bee, Pegasus Books (Bekeley, CA)
"A compelling balance of heady high concepts with pulp thrills...a welcome addition to Argentinian literature in translation--and to Weird fiction the world over."--Tobias Carroll, Reactor
"...the mirror house of Bonomini's collection throws up a multiplicity of reflections--not always flattering, but always revelatory."--Ancillary Review of Books
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