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Los lentos elefantes de Milan / The slow elephants of Milan
Tercer libro de Ángel Bonomini, poera, crítico de arte y cuentista. Son 10 cuentos que descubren "los íntimos vericuetos de la naturaleza humana", según la contratapa de la primera edición.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
128 pages, Paperback
First published December 15, 1978
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 11, 2026
This was a book I limited myself to only reading in the mornings, when my mind was sharpest, as the worlds presented in these stories are anything but ordinary and I found my end-of-day brain could not properly wrangle with the oneiric visions Bonomini had dreamt up.
I first want to remark on how impressed I was with Landsman's translation, I can imagine it's quite a task to translate such surreal stories, in attempting to maintain that aura of uncertainty and obliqueness without making it so opaque as to erase meaning. Landsman absolutely nailed it, rendering in beautifully precise sentences these metaphysical worlds that, seen through each narrator's eyes, resemble a sort of reality, but one where not all is as it seems.
The reader's perception of each story is influenced by the not always reliable, but deeply fascinating awareness of each narrator---often men reckoning with their memory or that of those around them. One of my favorite stories in the collection, Dream Scheme, is a short, more thought experiment than story, of a man who thinks through the effects of slowly removing items from the house, from the initial confusion his wife will feel to the eventual chaos that will ensue. Another favorite, You Must Go to Laar, sees a couple visit a strange city recommended to them by an encounter with a stranger. This city that may or may not exist is home to a bridge whose crossing will determine the future of the couple's relationship. In another story, a man is told his not-quite-lover has died so he's shocked to see her days later at a dinner party hosted by a friend.
This cohesive collection was such a treat and I'm not doing it justice with this measly review. It is one I would love to revisit and I'll absolutely be seeking out The Novices of Lerna.
I first want to remark on how impressed I was with Landsman's translation, I can imagine it's quite a task to translate such surreal stories, in attempting to maintain that aura of uncertainty and obliqueness without making it so opaque as to erase meaning. Landsman absolutely nailed it, rendering in beautifully precise sentences these metaphysical worlds that, seen through each narrator's eyes, resemble a sort of reality, but one where not all is as it seems.
The reader's perception of each story is influenced by the not always reliable, but deeply fascinating awareness of each narrator---often men reckoning with their memory or that of those around them. One of my favorite stories in the collection, Dream Scheme, is a short, more thought experiment than story, of a man who thinks through the effects of slowly removing items from the house, from the initial confusion his wife will feel to the eventual chaos that will ensue. Another favorite, You Must Go to Laar, sees a couple visit a strange city recommended to them by an encounter with a stranger. This city that may or may not exist is home to a bridge whose crossing will determine the future of the couple's relationship. In another story, a man is told his not-quite-lover has died so he's shocked to see her days later at a dinner party hosted by a friend.
This cohesive collection was such a treat and I'm not doing it justice with this measly review. It is one I would love to revisit and I'll absolutely be seeking out The Novices of Lerna.
September 29, 2026
This gently surreal collection of short stories by Argentinian writer openly questions the boundaries between memories, dreams, and the imagination. His narrators do not always know how to make sense of their experiences, but they rarely confront them, choosing instead to allow them to envelope them. As such, the reader requires a certain patience and willingness to suspend expectations and the desire for clear resolutions. One can sense his connection to his equally enigmatic Argentinian peers, like Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and get lost in his strange fictions.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2026/10/06/of...
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2026/10/06/of...
August 23, 2026
This story collection, for me, committed the common literary crime of extremely purple prose. So so heavy on “poetic” language and quite often nonsensical metaphor, both of these details contributing to such an obfuscation of any actual substance beneath the overt and excessive embellishment. I ultimately found each story to feel a bit underwhelming, almost like writing exercises that are trying too hard to impress a professor.
There was a notable collection of reused words or phrases (assumedly not purposeful repetition), which weirdly conflicted with the otherwise impression of heavy reference to a thesaurus, both interruptive in their own ways. Overall, not for me! Purple prose (purposeful or not) is a writing style that often grates on me personally, especially when half of the “fake deep” prose fails to make conscious sense when further isolated.
There was a notable collection of reused words or phrases (assumedly not purposeful repetition), which weirdly conflicted with the otherwise impression of heavy reference to a thesaurus, both interruptive in their own ways. Overall, not for me! Purple prose (purposeful or not) is a writing style that often grates on me personally, especially when half of the “fake deep” prose fails to make conscious sense when further isolated.
September 17, 2026
I doubt anything I read by Bonomini will come close to The Novices of Lorna. The other stories in that collection did not, and neither do these, though that is not to say I didn’t enjoy them.
There are some hits, and some lesser hits, but no misses.
The title story is a hit certainly, and though the stories are not linked, slow elephants are referred to in a couple of the other stories.
The story here that comes closest to Novices is the second in the book, You Must Go To Laar, in which a couple dreamily finds that they have traveled to a place that doesn’t seem to exist and in which they are completely alone. It has shades of John Howard and Mark Valentine in Secret Europe, a Tartarus publication, though of course, it can only be that they were influenced by Bonomini, as the story here was first published in 1978.
Another powerful story is The Reunion. The narrator imagines that his grief over the loss of a woman he loved, though never actually told her, alters reality, and sends him and his friends back to the past, when the woman was still alive. He encounters her once more, on the day he first met her, only this time, her name and appearance are very slightly different.
Bonomini‘s fantastical writing is a complete pleasure to read. I think there is more of his work that is not yet in translation, and I hope very much that it appears in English soon.
There are some hits, and some lesser hits, but no misses.
The title story is a hit certainly, and though the stories are not linked, slow elephants are referred to in a couple of the other stories.
The story here that comes closest to Novices is the second in the book, You Must Go To Laar, in which a couple dreamily finds that they have traveled to a place that doesn’t seem to exist and in which they are completely alone. It has shades of John Howard and Mark Valentine in Secret Europe, a Tartarus publication, though of course, it can only be that they were influenced by Bonomini, as the story here was first published in 1978.
Another powerful story is The Reunion. The narrator imagines that his grief over the loss of a woman he loved, though never actually told her, alters reality, and sends him and his friends back to the past, when the woman was still alive. He encounters her once more, on the day he first met her, only this time, her name and appearance are very slightly different.
Bonomini‘s fantastical writing is a complete pleasure to read. I think there is more of his work that is not yet in translation, and I hope very much that it appears in English soon.
Read
January 29, 2023Cada relato es genial y hermoso.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Real Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Enigmatic fictions from a lost master of Argentine literature.
A thick fog rolls into Milan as a man watches in astonishment while a procession of elephants crosses the street. A couple wandering through a forest is pointed toward a mysterious city from which they may never return. Two prisoners share a cell in the aftermath of a battle—one finds freedom in writing stories while the other is driven mad with envy.
The Slow Elephants of Milan expands Ángel Bonomini’s exploration of the interstitial realms between dream and reality. Originally published in 1978, these surreal and enigmatic fictions are among Bonomini’s finest and most autobiographical, threaded together by an insatiable curiosity about time, memory, art, and the divine.
With delicate precision, The Slow Elephants of Milan deconstructs the scaffolding of our perceptions to reveal what lies beneath: a metaphysical mirror-world that shimmers with haunting familiarity.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I didn't find the individual stories...twelve in all...particularly compelling as stories. Author Bonomini is no Hemingway, no transcendent master of the short-story form. He was an excellent craftsman who took great care to use the short-story form as a means to convey moods, insights, gestalts of incident building life.
The title story is a good example of this. A man sees a truly arresting sight: two elephants being led through the streets of Milan. Author Bonomini reflects on this without sentimentality, without concern for the elephant-ness of their existence; the narrator sees them when he is mid-reflection on the deep, deepening sadness of his life and soul; he sees these elephants multiple times walking almost unremarked through Milan's busy streets and is surprised afresh at how this sight he's captivated by is of little to no apparent interest to others.
Okay. That's the kind of trip we're going on, then, the odd but not impossible thing that carries Meaning and delves into Ideas. I wasn't eager for more but it's under 160pp, so what the hell. "Diary of My Portraits" was so memorable it lifted my impression of the collection above "nice work, not amazing but pleasantly engaging." In this story, the narrator sees a bird come into his apartment, thinks it is the same bird; but each time the bird is a different color. This happens in parallel to the narrator's partner painting his portrait, carefully and attentively creating an image of his face with laborious precision; then, dissatisfied with the likeness she has made, she destroys the portrait and begins afresh the process of capturing the narrator's appearance, his face, the image he shows to the world. Only to destroy it again. It is a lovely, poignant moment realizing that the artist's name...Moira...is a very interestingly resonant from its Greek bits to its resemblance to the Spanish verb form "mira"— "Look!"
To be the subject of this process, to have your likeness never completed, never satisfactory...to her, to the image's creator, no participation from you as the subject...was my key to finding these stories more in sum than they are as pieces. Gestalt formed yet? Everything in this collection of stories examines the image of a thing, the viewable parts changing but never fitting a single view, not even for a single viewer.
Instability and surveillance...seeing from on high...meet uneasily, irreconcilable in their differences of kind and sort of result. Nothing seen from the outside *is* the thing, no matter how much you want to call an elephant walking down a busy Italian street it is not.
It is itself.
Interesting ideas coming from perfectly fine stories will not be to everyone's taste, but I found the read much more than the sum of its parts.
The Publisher Says: Enigmatic fictions from a lost master of Argentine literature.
A thick fog rolls into Milan as a man watches in astonishment while a procession of elephants crosses the street. A couple wandering through a forest is pointed toward a mysterious city from which they may never return. Two prisoners share a cell in the aftermath of a battle—one finds freedom in writing stories while the other is driven mad with envy.
The Slow Elephants of Milan expands Ángel Bonomini’s exploration of the interstitial realms between dream and reality. Originally published in 1978, these surreal and enigmatic fictions are among Bonomini’s finest and most autobiographical, threaded together by an insatiable curiosity about time, memory, art, and the divine.
With delicate precision, The Slow Elephants of Milan deconstructs the scaffolding of our perceptions to reveal what lies beneath: a metaphysical mirror-world that shimmers with haunting familiarity.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I didn't find the individual stories...twelve in all...particularly compelling as stories. Author Bonomini is no Hemingway, no transcendent master of the short-story form. He was an excellent craftsman who took great care to use the short-story form as a means to convey moods, insights, gestalts of incident building life.
The title story is a good example of this. A man sees a truly arresting sight: two elephants being led through the streets of Milan. Author Bonomini reflects on this without sentimentality, without concern for the elephant-ness of their existence; the narrator sees them when he is mid-reflection on the deep, deepening sadness of his life and soul; he sees these elephants multiple times walking almost unremarked through Milan's busy streets and is surprised afresh at how this sight he's captivated by is of little to no apparent interest to others.
Okay. That's the kind of trip we're going on, then, the odd but not impossible thing that carries Meaning and delves into Ideas. I wasn't eager for more but it's under 160pp, so what the hell. "Diary of My Portraits" was so memorable it lifted my impression of the collection above "nice work, not amazing but pleasantly engaging." In this story, the narrator sees a bird come into his apartment, thinks it is the same bird; but each time the bird is a different color. This happens in parallel to the narrator's partner painting his portrait, carefully and attentively creating an image of his face with laborious precision; then, dissatisfied with the likeness she has made, she destroys the portrait and begins afresh the process of capturing the narrator's appearance, his face, the image he shows to the world. Only to destroy it again. It is a lovely, poignant moment realizing that the artist's name...Moira...is a very interestingly resonant from its Greek bits to its resemblance to the Spanish verb form "mira"— "Look!"
To be the subject of this process, to have your likeness never completed, never satisfactory...to her, to the image's creator, no participation from you as the subject...was my key to finding these stories more in sum than they are as pieces. Gestalt formed yet? Everything in this collection of stories examines the image of a thing, the viewable parts changing but never fitting a single view, not even for a single viewer.
Instability and surveillance...seeing from on high...meet uneasily, irreconcilable in their differences of kind and sort of result. Nothing seen from the outside *is* the thing, no matter how much you want to call an elephant walking down a busy Italian street it is not.
It is itself.
Interesting ideas coming from perfectly fine stories will not be to everyone's taste, but I found the read much more than the sum of its parts.
September 2, 2026
Generally speaking, when publishers bill story collections as weird/strange/surreal/bizarre/magical realist, the stories aren't particularly creative (let alone strange), the plots lack satisfying or meaningful conclusions, and the prose is purple and obtuse. Stories in those collections read like attempts to impress an imaginary interlocutor – a fellow MFA student, or creative writing professor, or the author's own anxiety over their lack of skill and creativity – not an effort to channel what the author feels MUST come through THEM. Few authors in the genre really cut deep in this way, deep enough to scar the reader; that's why its giants (Morrison, Márquez, Borges) are so deeply beloved, regularly cited, and often imitated.
This collection doesn't have those problems. I found myself grabbed gently by the arm, like an old friend dragging me across a party to introduce me to one of THEIR old friends, and led into rich and pleasant conversations with that other, unknown friend that resolved beautifully. What I love most about Bonomini (maybe) is that he is shamelessly curious, yet resists overexplaining himself or pursuing a mystery too far. His writing has just the right flavour of conspiracy, like any conversation between two close friends; I never had the feeling that he had something to prove, or that he was instructing me...only that he'd seen or felt something that he thought (knowing me as well as he does), I ought to know.
Bonomini was close with Borges (who praised and edited his friend's work), and the comparisons between them are apt, but the stories in this collection aren't imitations. He sinks into everyday life – confusion and fear, how and why we lie, what we dreamt last night and whether we care, what we cannot resist, or remember, or ever know about the people we love – and his observations about what it's really like to be a human being arrive humble and true, like a long-forgotten melody. These observations stand alone and above those of most authors I have read these past few years.
(Here I must also say that I love how he makes no dogma or finer point of his suggestion that everything is sacred, or that we are all worthy of the tremendous, stunning miracle of life: "Not just anyone," he says, "is born.")
Bonomini (and his gifted translator) show sensitivity at many levels here – story, paragraph, sentence, word. I wanted to leave a handful of examples here as further testament to why I love this book and will come back to it as often as I forget how much I loved how I felt when I first read it, but I'll stick to just the first of the many lines in this beautiful little book that I had to re-read immediately (and which, in retrospect, sums up the book – and this review – nicely):
"At times, I feel a deep mistrust toward writing; I believe that, in writing, one inevitably reveals personal things, even surreptitiously. And who, being able to read, is not like oneself? And who, being like oneself, needs to be told what they already know? But it's healthier not to question the things you can't help doing, like saying you've seen elephants, and instead gently meet the urge to tell. Because nobody recounts anything just for the sake of it, but they do so because the story demands it, becoming, once told, not what we know, but what we'd like others to know."
This collection doesn't have those problems. I found myself grabbed gently by the arm, like an old friend dragging me across a party to introduce me to one of THEIR old friends, and led into rich and pleasant conversations with that other, unknown friend that resolved beautifully. What I love most about Bonomini (maybe) is that he is shamelessly curious, yet resists overexplaining himself or pursuing a mystery too far. His writing has just the right flavour of conspiracy, like any conversation between two close friends; I never had the feeling that he had something to prove, or that he was instructing me...only that he'd seen or felt something that he thought (knowing me as well as he does), I ought to know.
Bonomini was close with Borges (who praised and edited his friend's work), and the comparisons between them are apt, but the stories in this collection aren't imitations. He sinks into everyday life – confusion and fear, how and why we lie, what we dreamt last night and whether we care, what we cannot resist, or remember, or ever know about the people we love – and his observations about what it's really like to be a human being arrive humble and true, like a long-forgotten melody. These observations stand alone and above those of most authors I have read these past few years.
(Here I must also say that I love how he makes no dogma or finer point of his suggestion that everything is sacred, or that we are all worthy of the tremendous, stunning miracle of life: "Not just anyone," he says, "is born.")
Bonomini (and his gifted translator) show sensitivity at many levels here – story, paragraph, sentence, word. I wanted to leave a handful of examples here as further testament to why I love this book and will come back to it as often as I forget how much I loved how I felt when I first read it, but I'll stick to just the first of the many lines in this beautiful little book that I had to re-read immediately (and which, in retrospect, sums up the book – and this review – nicely):
"At times, I feel a deep mistrust toward writing; I believe that, in writing, one inevitably reveals personal things, even surreptitiously. And who, being able to read, is not like oneself? And who, being like oneself, needs to be told what they already know? But it's healthier not to question the things you can't help doing, like saying you've seen elephants, and instead gently meet the urge to tell. Because nobody recounts anything just for the sake of it, but they do so because the story demands it, becoming, once told, not what we know, but what we'd like others to know."
September 3, 2026
Disappointing only compared to the outstanding first collection
The Novices of Lerna
; nonetheless Bonomini's trance-like short fictions continue to delight and beguile me in equal measure. You Must Go to Laar channels classic Calvino with a more emotional touch, After Oncativo evokes a Borgesian spiraling narrative coil to great effect, and The Reunion is Bonomini's own blend of bittersweet yet unsettling. The collection begins with the most unremarkable stories (the titular story, Dream Scheme, Diary of my Portraits) but the reader who pushes through will be rewarded with a very good set of stories. Taken together with his first English appearance, Bonomini is essential reading for fans of the short story and Latin American literature.
March 21, 2026
Es una colección de cuentos que inmediatamente te exige atención. Es experimental. Pude ver algunas coherencias en los temas tratados, sin embargo, en ocasiones la prosa se convertía en una masa amorfa que no lograba comprender.
No es tu tipo de libro si buscas algo rápido y de entendimiento veloz.
No es tu tipo de libro si buscas algo rápido y de entendimiento veloz.
September 5, 2026
Beautifully written and translated. A collection of abstract, dreamlike stories that challenge the reader’s understanding of reality and add nuance to life’s small moments. A small portion of the stories didn’t land for me personally, but overall this is a solid collection.
Thank you to Transit Press for the gifted copy.
Thank you to Transit Press for the gifted copy.
June 26, 2010
Muchos cuentos cursis, otros escritos imitando un estilo borgeano de reflexiones metafísicas sobre el tiempo y sobre lo circular de la vida pero en un tono ultrarreligioso trucho... para olvidar, lejos de ese gran cuento "Los novicios de Lerna"
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews