The Novices of Lerna EPUB

The Novices of Lernaintroduces the enigmatic fictions of ngel 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 collections central novella follows Ramn Beltra, an unambitious scholar whoreceives 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 projectall of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the schools 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, ngel 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 publishedThe Novices of Lerna, the first of four books of short stories he released before his death at age sixty-four.