THE NOVICES OF LERNA

These surreal stories reckon with identity, perception, and existence.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, Bonomini—a contemporary of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, and Jorge Luis Borges—has never been translated into English before. Much like his peers, Bonomini reckoned with both grand philosophical questions and the foibles of individual behavior. The title novella, which takes up much of this volume, focuses on an academic summoned to a strange institute of higher learning where all his fellow scholars—though hailing from different nations—look exactly alike. The men are given a series of rules that seem designed to further eradicate their individual identities, and by the time an epidemic begins thinning their ranks, it’s not clear if it’s an ironic coincidence or part of some plan. In the stories that follow, there’s a similar ambiguity, sometimes elevated to a metafictional level. After “The Model” appears to end, the story’s narrator chimes in to tell readers, “I have only been truthful about one thing.” The identities of characters in “The Bengal Tiger,” which opens with a series of potentially unrelated sentences about a woman and a tiger, blur as the story continues, eventually transforming the narrative into a dreamlike triangle in which a man, a woman, and a tiger alternate roles of love, death, and betrayal. In “Aromatic Herbs,” the narrator moves the story in and out of dreams, including one that ends with his own death. These tales are often heady, abounding with unlikely revelations and sudden moments of violence. Their arrival in English, translated by Landsman, is a welcome development.

A beguiling blend of the cerebral and the visceral.