The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman. Transit, 159 pp., $17.95 (paper)
In 1973 a small anthology was published in Argentina, its cover featuring the head—in kaleidoscopic quintuplicate—of a Victorian gentleman sporting a Vandyke beard. It was a collection of fantastic literature, a genre broadly defined as fiction that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, with a tendency toward metaphysical speculation, embraced with special fervor in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century.1 The anthology was edited by Alberto Manguel, a young bibliophile and writer who has gone on to edit many more volumes in the fifty years since. It is an eccentric object, with footnotes crawling up nearly every page and lengthy introductory sections preceding each story. The commentary is not just Manguel’s. Notes were solicited from each of the nine Argentine writers included, among them Borges (represented by the well-known story “The South”) and Julio Cortázar (with the equally well-known “House Taken Over”).
Included in this select company was Ángel Bonomini, a poet and art critic in his early forties who had just published his first story collection, Los novicios de Lerna (The Novices of Lerna). He is represented in Manguel’s anthology by the title story of that book, sandwiched between the contributions of Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares and taking up nearly as much space as the two of them together. (The story is almost a novella.) The placement is fitting, since nearly all the scanty critical appraisals of Bonomini over the last five decades begin by quoting a letter he received from Bioy Casares in 1972: “Borges came over [and] I proposed we read…‘The Novices of Lerna.’ We were dazzled.”
The same quote is printed on the back of Jordan Landsman’s translation of , appearing now fifty-two years after its original publication in Spanish. Rediscovered writers, a motley group so labeled based solely on their checkered publication history, arrive with a veneer of
