The Novices of Lerna

An overlooked and enigmatic master of Argentine fantastic literature, Ángel Bonomini garnered praise among peers and contemporaries like Borges, Bioy Casares, Ocampo, and Cortazar, 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. The Novices of Lerna introduces Bonomini's fantastic tales 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 mysteriously invited to attend a six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. After complying with the unusual qualifying paperwork (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," all subject to the same undisclosed project, and who look and sound exactly like 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...