''La casa'' (Spanish: "The House") is a 1954 novel by Argentine writer

Manuel Mujica Lainez Manuel Mujica LainezIn fact, the writer himself spelled his surnames without accents, as all his books published during his lifetime show. (11 September 1910 – 21 April 1984) was an Argentine novelist, essayist and art critic. He is mainly ...

. It tells the story of a family living in a stately

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

mansion from the heyday of

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

'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. This novel is a key link in Mujica Lainez's

cycle.

References

1954 Argentine novels Novels by Manuel Mujica Lainez Novels set in Buenos Aires {{1950s-novel-stub