Ángel Bonomini

Translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman.

A forgotten masterpiece by an enigmatic master of Argentine fantastic literature.

When unambitious scholar Ramón Beltra receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland, 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...

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.

“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.”
—Letter from Adolfo Bioy Casares to Ángel Bonomini, September 18, 1972

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