Imagine the sight: on a foggy February morning in Milan, the modest and apologetic narrator of the title story of this long overdue translation of short fiction by the enigmatic Argentinian writer Ángel Bonomini (1929–1994), is surprised to see two elephants emerge from the mist on the Via Manin. As a visitor passing through this elegant city, he is at a loss to explain his reaction to this most unexpected, incongruous sighting, and the vision stays with him, haunting his travels and following him home to Buenos Aires. Obsessively, he writes about his elephants until they begin to take on a larger (elephant sized?) psychological and metaphysical quality:
On my eyelids, the elephants’ footfalls weigh like nightmares. If only elephants had wings, and didn’t always step as though onto a rubbery, sticky surface that hardly permits movement . . . but no. They softly beat the ground, hardly touching it, hardly using it, and perhaps they hardly weigh anything at all, being so delicate and even-tempered, as if ashamed of their enormity, careful not to stick out, desiring to conceal themselves. Elephants are very delicate. They may be the only animals that deserve to walk on the streets of Milan.
And this world, where sometimes an elephant is more than an elephant, is the strange, gently surreal space Bonomini inhabits. A contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Sylvia Ocampo, he was a prolific short story writer but today he is all but forgotten in his home country. Slow Elephants of Milan, along with the 2024 release of The Novices of Lerna—both translated by Jordan Landsman—represent an effort to introduce this lost master to English speaking audiences.
In Bonomini’s hands, writing the fantastic takes on a distinctly light, fluid feel, and an oddness that often lies less in the story itself than in the angle by which it is approached and navigated. The boundaries between memories, dreams, and the imagination are constantly in flux, while his narrators often struggle to make sense of their experiences. But rarely do they confront the strangeness, choosing instead to allow it to envelope them, accepting the fate they are allotted. As such, one cannot anticipate clear resolutions as his tales draw to a close, or even, at times, clear lines between one story and another.
This collection of twelve stories, ten from 1978’s Slow Elephants of Milan and two from Love Stories (1982), introduces us to a wide cast of characters who find themselves forced or inclined to navigate the indistinct edges of reality where almost anything can be possible or impossible. Like the couple in “You Must Go to Laar,” who follow a stranger’s advice and take an unscheduled detour to a city that is on no map, find themselves in an oddly silent, nearly uninhabited town of towers and canals where time and distance seem distorted. It is said that no one who visits Laar will return unchanged. But they were not warned that they might not return at all . . . Or the narrator of “Diary of my Portraits” who recounts in fragmentary excerpts, how he sits, day after day, while his artist wife or lover captures variations of his likeness on her canvas, while reflecting on the existential relationship between his own being and her representations of him:
The fleetingness of things and beings. We love beings with a lasting glint in their eyes. Perhaps painting could rescue the eternity of an instant. But no. Everything is doomed to failure. All we can do is hope for something that, though it isn’t ours, represents us before eternity—like a face, this one indeed eternal, wrapped in a nameless fog.
Or the lonely captain, hero of “Captain Burn’s Bed,” destined to spend his naval career crossing the Atlantic between Liverpool and Baltimore, who is haunted by a woman who appears in his dreams but defies all his efforts to communicate with her. When tragedy strikes and his ship is sunk, his unrecorded survival sets him on a long, unlikely path to crafting a reality that will eventually put him in contact with the mysterious woman with whom he has been obsessed.
The magic of Bonomini’s world lies in the diffused quality of light he casts over the lives of his characters as they encounter the unexplained, experience violence, or lose themselves in erotic recollections that may or may not have any substance. The unreliability of memory and imagination is a pervasive theme, one that unites his eclectic tales. And his narrative tone, which tends to be thoughtful, questioning, and open to possibility, makes him a storyteller well worth spending a little time with.
Slow Elephants of Milan by Ángel Bonomini is translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman and published by Transit Books.
