Manuel Mujica Lainez

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Manuel Mujica Lainez[1] (11 September 1910 – 21 April 1984) was an Argentine novelist, essayist and art critic.

He is mainly known for his cycle of

His parents belonged to old and

In spite of their proud ancestry, the Mujica Lainez family was not notably well-off by this time, and he went to work at Buenos Aires' newspaper La Nación as literary and art critic. This permitted him to marry in 1936, his bride being a beautiful patrician girl, Ana de Alvear, descended from Carlos María de Alvear. They had two sons (Diego and Manuel) and a daughter (Ana). 1936 was also the year of the 25-year-old's first publication, Glosas castellanas.

Mujica Lainez was a member of the

Career

Mujica Lainez was preeminently a narrator and enumerator of Buenos Aires, from its earliest colonial times to the present. The society of Buenos Aires, especially high society, its past triumphs and present decadence, its quirks and geographies, its language and lies, its sexual vanities and dreams of love: he relished bringing all this to his elegantly written, quietly ironic, subtly subversive page. He was also a great translator. He translated

Throughout his career he received certain honors and awards, including Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1964), the distinction of Commander of Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1967) given by the Italian government and the Legion of Honour by the French government (1982). In 1964 he received the John F. Kennedy Prize for his novel Bomarzo, shared with fellow Argentine writer Julio Cortázar for his novel Hopscotch (1963).

Works

Novels

• Don Galaz de Buenos Aires (1938)
• The porteño saga:
  • Los ídolos (1952)
  • La casa (1954)
  • Los viajeros (1955)
  • Invitados en "El Paraíso" (1957)
• Bomarzo (1962)
• El unicornio (1965) translated as The Wandering Unicorn
• De milagros y de melancolías (1969)
• Cecil (1972)
• El laberinto (1974)
• El viaje de los siete demonios (1974)
• Sergio (1976)
• Los cisnes (1977)
• El gran teatro (1979)
• El brazalete (1981)
• El escarabajo (1982)

Short story collections

• Aquí vivieron (1949)
• Misteriosa Buenos Aires (1950)
• Crónicas reales (1967)
• Cuentos inéditos (posthumous, 1993)

Essays

• Glosas Castellanas (1936)

Biographies

• Miguel Cané (padre) (1942)
• Vida de Aniceto el gallo (1943)
• Vida de Anastasio el pollo (1947)

Translations

• Cuarenta y nueve sonetos de Shakespeare (1962)

Collaborations

• Canto a Buenos Aires (1943)
• Estampas de Buenos Aires (1946)

Opera

• Mujica Lainez adapted his novel
  set to music by Alberto Ginastera
  and premièred in 1967. This opera was banned by the Argentine military dictatorship in those days.