La casa
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| La casa | |
| Author | Manuel Mujica Laínez |
|---|---|
| Country | Argentina |
| Language | Spanish |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publication date | 1954 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
La casa (Spanish for The House) is a 1954 novel by Manuel Mujica Laínez.
It tells the story of a family living in a stately Buenos Aires mansion from the heyday of Argentina's oligarchy in the 1880s to some time in the post-1946 period, the era of Peronist populism, seen typically as incarnating the end of History, the crisis of modern civilization.
The House constitutes not only the narrator but the real protagonist: its inhabitants (including two ghosts) and the encircling wolves are perceived as actors within a living structure, a living structure that never ceases to die.
Death and decay, in the manner of Spanish Golden Age drama, are very much the ultimate subject of this novel: bygone-age aristocrats are subversively (and amusingly) idealised so as to dramatise their fall (to which they are sometimes murderously pushed by insane agents) while the "lower orders" are treated with undisguised hatred. Mujica Laínez, after all, was something of a Platonist, with no truck for the literary or the political Left.
It is perhaps for that reason that that monument to Correct Literary Taste, The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Work, from Antiquity to the Present. Claude J. Summers (Editor), does not deign to mention him at all.
This novel is a key link in Mujica Laínez' Buenos Aires cycle.
