A singular focus on the tension between you and me—more specifically, between where I end and you begin—binds the novella and fifteen fictions of Àngel Bonomini’s belated English-language debut, The Novices of Lerna. In these tales, egoists unsuccessfully confront their doppelgängers, maniacs attempt to stand out, and confident young denizens of Buenos Aires lose themselves in strange romantic trysts. Existing somewhere between wonder and pessimism, despair and dumb luck, The Novices of Lerna casts doubt on the reassuring belief that self-determination, freedom, and uniqueness are inalienable aspects of the human condition. In this collection, they become contested territories, capacities that Bonomini’s characters assert, defend, or simply discard.

Far and away the collection’s highlight, the titular novella revolves around Ramon Beltran, a recalcitrant, uninspiring law school graduate. Despite a paltry record of accomplishments, “a degree [he] had barely obtained and an article of dubious originality,” soon after his graduation Ramon is selected for a too-good-to-be-true fellowship at the rural Swiss University of Lerna. The only stipulation is that he must provide an exhaustive dossier on the proportions of his body. Ramon mocks and bemoans the invasiveness of this dossier, saying “it would be difficult to convince anyone that I wasn’t filling out the application for an insane asylum,” but obliges nevertheless. Arriving at Lerna, he finds twenty-three other scholars already in residence, each of whom is identical to him in every way. Clad in indistinguishable blue jumpsuits and abiding by a set of bizarre social rules (“you could drink and smoke as much as you liked, but they asked that nobody offer alcohol or tobacco to anyone else”), they are encouraged to pass six months in anonymous leisure, conversing with their mirror images while the university surveils them for an undisclosed project.

Originally published in Argentina in 1972, Los Novicios de Lerna marked Bonomini’s fiction debut after several decades as a poet, journalist, and translator. Although his work was admired by Jorge Luis Borges and other prominent contemporaries, Bonomini was forgotten in his lifetime, untranslated abroad and unread at home. This translation by Jordan Landsman follows a recent spurt of Spanish monographs and reprintings that place Bonomini within the canon of great Argentine writers. Landsman does an excellent job capturing off-kilter shifts from hardboiled cynism to lyric beauty that mark the prose. Ramon announces that he is “devoid of faith in that thing people call warmth,” and moments later waxes poetic about a lover: “I let her enter my memory like an army of details whose aim was to invade and occupy me.” Such contrasts enrich the novella, particularly its characters.

That Bonomini’s rediscovery should occur now is hardly accidental. His fictions are strikingly suited to this moment of global instability and fragmentation. Bonomini finds a way of texturing upheaval into his stories as though it were simply a fact of life. In one story, there’s a  plague that may or may not really be a plague. In another, a woman becomes a tiger, becomes her husband, eats the tiger, becomes a woman again, and so on. A third story, “The Model,” begins with a logical reversal that sheds light on the way Bonomini threads insecurity and suspicion into his work:

The logic upon which our language is based forces us to accept a rather innocent order of causes and effects: the conventional before and after. So, as long as we use our current language, time will work in our stories like the waves of the sea beneath a child’s drawing of a sailboat. But suddenly, what the child has drawn is the sea, and the ship serves only to prove it.

Perhaps this isn’t a simple love story but rather a description of one of time’s abominable jokes.

What seems like the story’s focus—the boat—becomes an “abominable joke” of fate, becomes evidence of something greater and more inexplicable at work.

“The Model” includes three self-conscious subheadings: Introduction, The Facts, The End. This simple structure, a joke in itself, highlights the text’s loose experimentalism. Following the philosophical introduction, a destitute narrator in tattered underwear stumbles into a relationship built upon an adult game of dress-up. Every day, he observes a wealthy woman as she appears in countless extravagant outfits, which he matches to archetypes and literary characters. But this story is only a different narrator’s allegory for a different relationship. A writer hovers above the plot like a fickle god manipulating the characters. There are no facts. The ending, if it can be called that, coincides with the very moment the story switches from past tense to present: “I smell a whiff of gunpowder in her repugnant mouth.”

In Bonomini’s hands, the question “why am I me, and why not you” (to borrow a line from Peter Handke) becomes vital and fresh. Two solutions are proposed and intertwined. One is concrete, parochial, rooted in identifiable facts of personal identity. The other is ineffable, a confidence in spite of life’s mutability that evades articulation. 

The tension pervades The Novices, where Ramon’s pride in his labels is made ridiculous. He announces that he’s a womanizer as though it were reputable quality, comforts himself with reminders that he’s from Buenos Aires, and disparages anyone who doesn’t know his football team. But as the novella progresses, the comedy dwindles. A plague that only afflicts the twenty-four identical scholars descends on the university while the school administration is unnervingly, perhaps criminally calm. There is no fear of contagion, just a steady disappearance of identical men. As fewer and fewer gather in the communal cafeteria, those who remain demand to know who is who, unable in their sameness to tell which of their group has succumbed to the illness and which of them remain. 

Beyond The Novices and one or two other pieces, the stories in this collection are best described as literary shots in the dark, shards of ideas that are more cerebrally than narratively engaging. “Theories” imagines a young boy who enthralls his older sister with conspiracy stories about everyday objects: “the one about the seeds, the one about hair, the one about crazy women and their hats, the one about gas pumps, the one about insects, the one about the fig tree, the one about the word ‘temptation.’” In another short piece, “Fire,” a pyromaniac perched in a tree watches a town’s inhabitants fill the streets as they pray that the blaze consuming their church will be extinguished. These vignettes fascinate in their intellectual dexterity but offer little in terms of character, emotion, or tension in narration.

Bonomini lampoons flimsily constructed identities but doesn’t underestimate the complexity of living without them. Riding a horse up a Swiss hill at night, Ramon listens to his own voice multiplied back to him by the mountains and recalls an Italian singer who, with five different voices, begs for permission to die. The great and the small stand side by side, as Ramon feels himself in relation to everything else but also in his apartness. These may not be lucid declarations, but if one is to believe Bonomini—and he is convincing—they are the seeds of being alive.

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Born in Buenos Aires in 1929 where he lived until his death at the age of sixty-four, Àngel Bonomini was a contemporary of famed Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, and Julio Cortazar. In his lifetime, Bonomini was the two-time recipient of the prestigious Premio Konex. The Novices of Lerna was originally published in Spanish in 1972.

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Jordan Landsman was born in New York City. After graduating from Binghamton University, he spent several years living in Buenos Aires, where he co-created the BA Comedy Lab and taught literary workshops at Walrus Books. The Novices of Lerna is his first translation.

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Willem Marx is a writer and translator from Brooklyn by way of Vicenza. His work can be found in Asymptote, Publishers Weekly, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. He is assistant fiction editor at Asymptote, reads poetry for Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and writes for himself.