Ángel Bonomini, The Novices of Lerna, Trans. by Jordan Landsman, 2024
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.
These surreal stories reckon with identity, perception, and existence.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, Bonomini—a contemporary of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, and Jorge Luis Borges—has never been translated into English before. Much like his peers, Bonomini reckoned with both grand philosophical questions and the foibles of individual behavior. The title novella, which takes up much of this volume, focuses on an academic summoned to a strange institute of higher learning where all his fellow scholars—though hailing from different nations—look exactly alike. The men are given a series of rules that seem designed to further eradicate their individual identities, and by the time an epidemic begins thinning their ranks, it’s not clear if it’s an ironic coincidence or part of some plan. In the stories that follow, there’s a similar ambiguity, sometimes elevated to a metafictional level. After “The Model” appears to end, the story’s narrator chimes in to tell readers, “I have only been truthful about one thing.” The identities of characters in “The Bengal Tiger,” which opens with a series of potentially unrelated sentences about a woman and a tiger, blur as the story continues, eventually transforming the narrative into a dreamlike triangle in which a man, a woman, and a tiger alternate roles of love, death, and betrayal. In “Aromatic Herbs,” the narrator moves the story in and out of dreams, including one that ends with his own death. These tales are often heady, abounding with unlikely revelations and sudden moments of violence. Their arrival in English, translated by Landsman, is a welcome development.
A beguiling blend of the cerebral and the visceral. - Kirkus
Argentinian writer Bonomini (1929–1994) makes a noteworthy English-language debut with this entrancing collection. After Ramón Beltra, the Argentine narrator of the title novella, accepts an enigmatic invitation to an illustrious fellowship in the Swiss mountain town of Lerna, he travels abroad for the first time (“Visiting Europe is something that every Argentine keeps in reserve as an unquestionable inheritance; to visit is almost a disappointment”), only to discover that every fellowship recipient looks identical to him. When some of these “novices,” as they’re called, fall ill from a mysterious epidemic, they begin to consider whether they are not there to study but to be studied. The narrator of “The Martyr” pines for his former lover who left her dog behind, and the story takes a dark turn as he considers what it might take to see her again. With “The C.C.C,” Bonomini creates a world of parallel universes and replicas in the story of two aging cousins whose lives appear to be entirely unremarkable. Tricky but never gimmicky, this will appeal to admirers of Borges. - Publishers Weekly
Argentinian writer Bonomini (1929–1994) makes a noteworthy English-language debut with this entrancing collection. After Ramón Beltra, the Argentine narrator of the title novella, accepts an enigmatic invitation to an illustrious fellowship in the Swiss mountain town of Lerna, he travels abroad for the first time (“Visiting Europe is something that every Argentine keeps in reserve as an unquestionable inheritance; to visit is almost a disappointment”), only to discover that every fellowship recipient looks identical to him. When some of these “novices,” as they’re called, fall ill from a mysterious epidemic, they begin to consider whether they are not there to study but to be studied. The narrator of “The Martyr” pines for his former lover who left her dog behind, and the story takes a dark turn as he considers what it might take to see her again. With “The C.C.C,” Bonomini creates a world of parallel universes and replicas in the story of two aging cousins whose lives appear to be entirely unremarkable. Tricky but never gimmicky, this will appeal to admirers of Borges. - Publishers Weekly
Ángel Bonomini is one of those extraordinary literary figures who—despite having been lauded for his singular, masterful inventions—has somehow fallen into oblivion. In addition to being a cultural critic and prolific translator, the poems and stories published throughout Argentina in his lifetime represented a vital contribution to the nation’s phenomenon of fantastic narrative. While he remained largely unknown to international readers in his lifetime, such work earned him multiple distinguished accomplishments in his home country—including two Premio Konex awards and personal accolades from Jorge Luis Borges. In 1994, at the age of sixty-four, Bonomini passed away, and sadly, his writing seemed to disappear with him.
Now, in The Novices of Lerna, Jordan Landsman has captured the author’s wistful and pensive voice in a stirring collection of sixteen previously untranslated stories, spreading the magic to a new generation of readers. With candles melted “as if light had been slit from their veins,” theories “woven like black thread in the dead of night,” and people “like books with transparent pages where the lines don’t match up,” Bonomini glides vividly and lyrically into worlds where time warps, people live and die and live again, doppelgängers are plentiful, sentences disappear into amorphous paragraphs, and Buenos Aires isn’t quite the same urban sprawl that one might see in Argentina. While the pieces in this collection have no crossover in plot or character, some subterranean power connects them, with favored symbols and images appearing and reappearing—figs, trees, fires, death, and the landscape of the city.
In the titular story, which takes up the first fifty-three pages of the book, the protagonist Ramón Beltra is invited to participate in a mysterious fellowship program at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. On his journey there, he briefly falls in love with a flight attendant, and while this love lasts for no longer than two pages, it serves as the emotional center for Beltra—and the reader—to hold onto when the trip soon unravels. The rules of Lerna are strange, with one being that the fellows are not allowed to distinguish themselves through their clothing, and this takes an absurdist turn when Beltra meets the other fellows, finding that they are all perfectly identical to himself. Commenting on this phenomenon, Beltra notes: “When a group wears the same uniform and its members are also physically identical, more than just equal and depersonalized, individuals are almost invisible.” Soon, the identical fellows begin to suspect that something unusual, even sinister, is happening to them; they fall victim to a mass epidemic, which wipes them out one by one.
Through this plot of the double, Bonomini takes the classic trope of the evil twin and turns it into a social commentary on finding oneself in a world of rigid, suffering homogeneity. Like Borges’ “Borges and I,” Bonomini splits character, wonderfully losing track of the narrator as a singular identity, and the off-kilter plot is complemented by the labyrinthine structure of the university: concentric circles, numbered apartments, an ominous forest, coffered ceilings, uncanny repetitions. Beltra confides: “I didn’t want to get lost like a rat in this maze, which was complex despite its seeming simplicity.” It is as apt a description for the edifice as it is for the narrative, which reads as if standing in a room of mirrors.
Of the collection, “The Bengal Tiger” is perhaps the most experimental; every line seems to contradict the one before it, as Bonomini subverts narrative structure in order to portray something ambiguous about the act of storytelling and fictional realities. The first paragraph begins with: “A woman is dancing and a scream is heard,” and ends with: “A dance screams up the woman that’s tigering.” A tiger eats the woman, but much of the material reality of this event, whether the animal is a physical entity or some representation of her husband or herself, is left unclear. Bonomini concludes this confounding text by stating: “Mankind will have isolated instants just as they have isolated atoms,” implying that the tale is a shattering of one into various contradictory narratives—a nuclear fission of a story. Jumping through time with no real beginning or end, it loops around itself in an ouroboros of love and betrayal, with the tiger activating endless transformations: “Every time it blinks, [it] extinguishes reality for an instant.” The shift of perspective lending different angles to reality is something that Bonomini masterfully captures. As he writes in another story: “Maybe it’s just time, pure time, that makes us see the same things as if they were different.”
There are moments, throughout the collection, where Bonomini grounds the reader in realism; while each story launches the reader into a land of speculative adventure, the metaphysical riddles occur amidst an underlying feeling of relative mundanity. The characters sit at cafes, in apartments, in bed. A man watches a woman at a private fashion show, a seemingly normal event until the clothing eventually reveals an almost infinite series of changes, resulting in a culmination of shows that take nearly a lifetime to watch. Toeing the line between magical realism and lyric, the author remains in conversation with postmodernists of his generation while crafting an utterly distinct voice: one in which Jordan Landsman translates with grace. As grand as the narratives are in theoretical thought, almost all consist of zoomed-in moments during everyday life, and it is in this smallness that the wildest of experiences, and the largest of questions, can feel entirely real.
In telling these tales, Bonomini tends to smudge the line between poetry and prose. “The Singer” is a string of words dragged across four pages, consisting of a single sentence. In this long surge of breathless recollection, the narrator learns of the death of a singer, reveals the powers eventually given those who revealed the news of the death, considers the ambiguity of what it means for an artist to die, and philosophizes on the malleability of memory as radios play the still-vivid voice of a deceased singer—how the music “swept through the house and my house was everyone’s house and listen these are not empty words for good reason it was buenosaires everything that happened happened there even the fig tree and the jasmines.” People emerge, dressed as the singer still, denying death so easily, as if “everything had been a dream and one day he’d return to tell us about the hospital where he’d stayed where they’d healed his burns and fortunately his face was untouched by flames.”
The most revealing (though, in typical Bonomini style, it is also obscured) piece of the collection is perhaps “Theories,” where the protagonist, an unnamed cousin of the character, Jacinta, is overwhelmed by the infinity of theories. While the narrator holds back from ever disclosing these theories—let alone what they pertain to overall—it is made known that they concern figs and melon seeds and hair. The theories are woven in darkness, very difficult to see and describe, but one can surmise their contents through a moment of clarity: “when you’re dreaming, the world you’re dreaming in turns into the place you’re dreaming about,” and when you awake, “everything disappears, because dreams are like theories made of thread.”
It is a testament to this collection’s dizzying, wandering nature that the reader is left to consider: what if this story is true? In that sliver of time it takes to gloss over the small black ink of the justified paragraphs and flip through the thin paper pages, who’s to say that the places you visited didn’t briefly come to life? The narrator questions the theoretical nature of theories, extending an interrogation toward any solid fact. Bonomini’s language dances across the page, manipulating stories in a way that both plays with and subverts typical plot structures. At times, words disappear into narrative, like brushstrokes hiding in a painting. At other times, they surface to the front of the page: the words themselves shining in the spotlight.
The final story, “Index Card,” is a short, melancholy account of an unrecognized, unappreciated writer and “his sole and fervent admirer.” Like this character, Bonomini’s musings have fallen through the cracks of time, meeting the same fate. As such, this translated collection represents a resounding archeological project, resurfacing the writing of a forgotten writer whose work is as powerful and unique as that of his celebrated contemporaries. It is a ghost of a book that haunts and perplexes, enticing each reader in with its mastery of language and craft. - Jordan Spector
The Novices of Lerna collects the longer title story and fifteen shorter ones, Ángel Bonomini's first collection of fiction, published in 1972.
'The Novices of Lerna' is narrated by Argentine Ramón Beltra. A recent law school graduate, age twenty-four, he is surprised to receive an offer for a six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. The fellowship itself sounds almost too good to be true, beginning with the amount of money involved; it also sounds like a great opportunity -- and would be a chance to see a bit of the world. Nevertheless, Beltra isn't entirely comfortable with this offer from afar -- not least because: "the tone aroused my suspicion due to how cloying, cautious, and bland it was". Still, it's just too great an opportunity to pass up.
Puzzlingly and disturbingly, while they don't ask for much additional information in making the arrangements, they do require: "a frankly disconcerting report of my physical characteristics". The seven-page report he has to fill out includes measurements: "so detailed and varied that someone could have easily reproduced my body down to the millimeter" .....
The University of Lerna is a small institution, generally with some two hundred students in residence:
But every five years, the university went into recess for a year and the students abandoned the premises while the majority of the professors traveled to other centers of study. Only a few teachers remained at Lerna and continued their research linked to the old House: Theology, Mathematics, and Law. This was a recess year and the university had invited twenty-four professionals from different parts of the world.
Beltra is one of the twenty-four and, upon his arrival, comes to understand exactly what quality earned him his spot there. On the one hand, the two dozen 'novices' are: "surrounded by luxury and attended to like kings", on the other ... they find themselves in a pretty creepy situation. And there are rules to follow -- not exactly onerous ("Avoid introductions when meeting with two or more fellows", or: don't offer anyone alcohol or tobacco (though anyone who wants to consume either is perfectly free to)), but certainly complicating social interaction. And the objective of this experiment was "kept completely secret" by the university:
Everyone was allowed to consider, judge, assess, and interpret the fact in any way they pleased, but the university reserved the right not to communicate the objective of the "project" to any individual fellow or group.
Beltra settles in and he and his fellow novices go about life there more or less normally -- even as the situation is hardly normal. And, ultimately, things do not go well. It's an interesting social-philosophical exercise Bonomini plays out here; with the physical as a starting point, it nevertheless is above all metaphysical, addressing questions of identity and the individual.
'The Novices of Lerna' reminds of the works of Borges and Bioy Casares, and not just because of the Argentine connection, and Bonomini was surely influenced by these writers, as is also suggested by the similarly philosophical-speculative stories that complete the collection.
These stories include 'The Model', which begins with a brief 'Introduction'-section before getting to 'The Facts' -- with an explanatory 'Note' appended to it, which begins: "I have only been truthful about one thing" ..... The brief 'Index Card' summarizes the life and career(s) of Joachin Despines, who published six books of poetry which don't get the attention and acclaim he feels they deserve; he reïnvents himself as 'Paul Beranger', dedicating himself to praising: "France's greatest poet, Joachin Despines", and achieves great success as a critic -- yet without achieving his actual goal. 'The Report' is that of a revolutionary leader who has just successfully overthrown the previous government and is explaining the new governmental theory his regime means to implement -- reactionary as much as revolutionary ("The path of the people is a backward path that goes forward, in a time that comes from the future and will end in the past") --, a clever spin on the claims and promises of revolution.
It's a neat little mix of stories -- though apparently only a fairly small selection of Bonomini's writing. Cleverly imagined, Bonomini spins fascinating philosophical and theoretical ideas out in his tales; fortunately, too, he's a talented writer and the stories -- in a variety of styles -- read very well as well.
With practically nothing of his work previously available in English, it's good to see this collection of his fiction; hopefully, more will follow. - M. A. Orthofer
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/argentina/bonominia.htm
Ludwig Feuerbach, the 19th century German philosopher best remembered as an intellectual bridge between Hegel and Marx, once posited an anthropological explanation for belief in God. In Feuerbach’s conception, the divine served as a great mirror, allowing humanity to abstract self-reflection and come to a greater understanding of its own nature—divine love, wisdom, and creation being in reality human love, wisdom, and creation. True or not for God, this framework can be adapted to explain the power of non-realist fiction: in projecting our lives beyond our worldly preconceptions, we gain the abstraction necessary for analysis of our own reality. Sometimes, only a mirror can reveal.
So it is with Ramón Beltra, narrator of the titular story in The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini (originally published in Argentina in 1972 and now translated into English by Jordan Landsman), which occupies about a third of the collection.
An Argentine law graduate who eschews professional ambition in favor of wine, women, and spirited conversation, Beltra is irritated to receive a letter offering a generous fellowship at a Swiss university, which his mentor all but forces him to accept. He resigns himself to enjoying the associated travel and conducts a brief love affair with a flight attendant, Sandra, en route. This relationship will later become a frequent touchstone in Beltra’s thoughts, a weight it bears a little awkwardly given the brevity of Sandra’s original mention.
Upon reaching Lerna, Beltra discovers he is one of twenty-four “novices,” all of whom are physically identical, down to their uniform blue jumpsuits.
In Beltra’s dealings with his duplicates, he is confronted with twenty-three reflections of himself:
It was as if we were a single person reflected fully in each fragment of a shattered mirror. I imagined we all formed part of a single being captured in each moment of a grotesque contortion. I thought of another mirror, mobile and perverse, that with arbitrary skill would suddenly reproduce the many profiles of a man, invent for him innumerable hands, or give a simultaneous version of his face as it passed through pain and fear, stupor and happiness, love and hate, delirium and mockery.
At first, Beltra flinches against this recognition. He finds in the other novices a multitude of faults, most seriously their manner in following the bizarre rules set by the institution’s cryptic experiment, and at times he experiences a kind of horror in seeing his own visage so externalized. Only when the men begin disappearing, falling to an inexplicable illness, does this relationship fundamentally shift. As Beltra comes to resolve his feelings towards his duplicates, his own sense of self and purpose in action deepen.
While the story is slow to start—beginning with the details of Beltra’s prior life and the exacting photographs and measurements required in advance of his departure for the fellowship—it picks up considerably once Beltra arrives in Lerna, the psychological tension building to a haunting catharsis.
The remainder of the stories in the collection return again and again to the paradox of individuality, the tension of observation, the image of mirrors. “The C.C.C.” finds two cousins falling into a mysterious chain of identical cafes. In the profound isolation of “By the Word,” a passion of the self is spoken into being. And throughout the collection, death is given many faces: it is a portal (“The Martyr”), an indulgence (“Figs and Jasmines”), a mutation (“Index Card”); it contains all deaths (“The Singer”).
“The Report” delivers a thematic manifesto, as a revolutionary junta declares that time flows in reverse, human senses function as mirrors, and God is the consequence of reality. All must reject Aristotelian logic and remake society into a world of poets that runs from Apocalypse to Genesis until “darkness shall come and God shall live in the Glory man hath created for Him.” It is Feuerbach turned inside out.
Like the God of Feuerbach, the mirror house of Bonomini’s collection throws up a multiplicity of reflections—not always flattering, but always revelatory.
In “The Model,” a writer’s gaze transforms one woman into many in endless fictional fashion shows, culminating in fantastical melodrama. With a metatextuality that suggests the influence of Borges (Bonomini’s more famous compatriot, known for his own nested stories), the piece ends with a lengthy note by its “author” dispelling his telling of events and instead revealing a grisly view of the connection between love and hate. The contrast is well-done, but, taken with the symbolic treatment of Sandra in the collection’s title story and the inclusion of another piece, “Enemies,” in which a man finds his lover too beautiful to behold, the story exemplifies the object role that women often serve for Bonomini’s masculine narrators—frequently that of mirrors, possessing depth only when viewed by another.
Across the stories, Bonomini experiments in style and form. Here, tenses shift; there, punctuation is eschewed. This occasionally feels uneven, as in “The Fire,” in which the voyeuristic perspective of an arsonist comes off a little muddled. More often, however, Bonomini’s style is lively, seamlessly building to psychic resonance.
Boldest of these experiments is “The Bengal Tiger.” Bonomini shatters every line into kaleidoscopic possibility, telling a story of a woman, a man, and a tiger in relentless permutation—each eating and being eaten, imprisoning and being imprisoned, seeing and being seen—and all beheld by the eye of a great world-mirror. It’s a stylistic leap, but one Bonomini performs masterfully.
The collection’s most compelling writing comes in “Aromatic Herbs,” in which a dreamer is trapped in a looping heaven or hell of his own making. Currents of language mesmerize as he relives the same deadly journey with his phantom beloved again and again, a litany of remembered herbs serving as countdown to disaster.
Like the God of Feuerbach, the mirror house of Bonomini’s collection throws up a multiplicity of reflections—not always flattering, but always revelatory. What did its creator see, standing in its center? Three decades after his death, I find myself wandering its halls, and the light still catches. - Will McMahon
