The Novices of Lerna

An essay by Julio Cortázar springs to mind whilst reading this astonishing collection of short stories by Ángel Bonomini, published by Safarà. We are referring to the famous ‘tunnel theory’ proposed by the Argentine writer. And Bonomini, too, is Argentine. Temporal distortions, unknown worlds, doubles and multiples, fakes, mirrors, dreams, imaginary writers: it is precisely reality that one ends up questioning in these magnificent pages. The logical structures we are used to encountering in a novel are thrown out. Everything happens seamlessly. We slip into the unusual as we move from one line to the next. Reality suddenly appears displaced. Where have we ended up? In a sort of ‘interzone’. Or in that tunnel Cortázar spoke of. A work that delves into the form and logic of the written page. These stories thus appear as strange anamorphoses. Someone or something must have caused a slight shift in the Earth’s axis and transported us elsewhere. This is what happens in the story that gives the collection its title. Who are these novices of Lerna? And where is Lerna located? It is one of those places marked on an imaginary map: a fantastical place. As we read these pages, we find ourselves geographically in that area which the ancients labelled ‘Hic sunt leones’. Unknown and unexplored places. Seductive and astonishing. The novices of Lerna, for example, number twenty-four. Twenty-four are the lookalikes, the doubles who attend the university lecture theatres. Something akin to the story of Monsieur Klein, but multiplied by twenty-four. “To see one’s own mouth as it laughs, one’s own eyes as they look (not in a dream, but right there, fifty centimetres away); to see one’s stolen identity, transferred to another individual who, to a certain extent, was myself: I felt a wave of hatred and it seemed to me that the theft had a different significance from the one I had attributed to it until that moment”. A cruel, unsettling tale, with a touch of mystery. The collection is a map of the fantastical. In ‘The Report’, an imaginary opening address presents history in inverted form (“The universe began with the Apocalypse and will end with Genesis”; ‘A man in front of a mirror is a man turned upside down’). And it is a veritable proliferation of magnetic models, aromatic herbs, enemies, martyrs and theories. An entire unstable, otherworldly universe unfolds before our eyes. Borges and Bioy Casares smile. ‘In the immense, star-filled night, I heard my voice repeated by the echo, multiplied by the mountains. But I knew that the voice was unique and my own.’ Thus ends “The Novices of Lerna”. One is led to think that the self is nothing other than this: an echo that spreads and wanders, out of place, through these pages.

Ángel Bonomini

Safarà, 167 pp., 18 euros