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Title details for The Novices of Lerna by Angel Bonomini - Available

The Novices of Lerna

by Angel Bonomini
Jordan Landsman
Audiobook
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The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English listeners 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, before slipping mysteriously into obscurity. 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 7, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9798855539752
      • File size: 137197 KB
      • Duration: 04:45:49

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 22, 2024
      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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