The Novices of Lerna
by Ángel Bonomini
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Description
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 Ramon 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 show more 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. show lessTags
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ThingScore 75
To say that Borges was a fan may not be saying much – he was a fan of everything, from GK Chesterton to the rolling hills of Yorkshire – but it gives an indication of what to expect: something mysterious and reflective; accessible and yet also confounding.
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Author Information
7 Works 56 Members
Some Editions
Common Knowledge
- Original title
- Los novicios de Lerna
- Original publication date
- 1972
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, Fantasy
- DDC/MDS
- 863.64 — Literature & rhetoric Spanish Literature Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000
- LCC
- PQ7797 .B628 .T6413 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures Spanish literature Provincial, local, colonial, etc. Spanish America
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 44
- Popularity
- 673,702
- Rating
- (4.00)
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 1
