Manuel Mujica Láinez
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Manuel Mujica Láinez, Argentine fiction writer and art critic, was born in Buenos Aires on 11 September, 1910 and died at Cruz Chica, Córdoba Province on 21 April, 1984.
His parents belonged to old and aristocratic families, being descended from the founder of the city of Buenos Aires, Juan de Garay, as well as from notable men of letters of Nineteenth Century Argentina, such as Florencio Varela and Miguel Cané. As was traditional at the time, the family spent protracted periods in Paris and London so that Manuel, known proverbially and famously as Manucho, could become proficient in French and English. He completed his formal education at the Colegio Nacional de San Isidro, later dropping out of Law School.
In spite of their proud ancestry, the Mujica-Laínez family was not notably well-off by this time, and Manucho went to work at Buenos Aires' great 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.
1936 was also the year of the 25-year-old's first publication, Glosas castellanas.
Work and Viewpoint
Manucho was preeminently the 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.
Oeuvre
- Glosas Castellanas (1936)
- Don Galaz de Buenos Aires (1938)
- Miguel Cané (padre) (1942)
- Canto a Buenos Aires (1943)
- Vida de Aniceto el gallo (1943)
- Estampas de Buenos Aires (1946)
- Vida de Anastasio el pollo (1947)
- Aquí vivieron (1949)
- Misteriosa Buenos Aires (1950)
- Los Ídolos (1952)
- La casa (1954)
- Los viajeros (1955)
- Invitados en "El Paraíso" (1957)
- Bomarzo (1962)
- Cincuenta sonetos de Shakespeare (1962)
- El unicornio (1965)
- Crónicas reales (1967)
- De milagros y de melancolías (1969)
- Cecil y otros cuentos (1972)
- El laberinto 1974
- El viaje de los siete demonios (1974)
- Sergio (1976)
- Los cisnes (1977)
- El gran teatro (1980)
- El brazalete (1981)
- El escarabajo (1982)
- Cuentos inéditos (1993)
Librettist
Mujica Láinez adapted his novel Bomarzo for the operatic stage, writing the libretto set to music by Alberto Ginastera and premièred in 1967. Both librettist and composer obtained the Pulitzer Prize.
