Margaret Jull Costa on La Casa (“The House”) by Manuel Mujica Lainez

By Margaret Jull Costa — Published on December 7, 2009

Manuel Mujica Lainez’s wonderful 1954 novel, La Casa (“The House”), has a stately Buenos Aires mansion as egotistical narrator, relating its own story and that of its protagonists, who all come to a sticky and often absurd end. The novel spans a period from the 1880s to the late 1940s and is a biting satire on the house’s original aristocratic residents, their more low-born successors, and its two melancholy ghosts. La Casa forms part of a cycle of novels Mujica Lainez wrote about Buenos Aires, none of which, for some reason, have so far been translated.

Margaret Jull Costa is one of the most lauded translators working today from Portuguese and Spanish. Her translations include Jose Saramago, Javier Marias, and many others.

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• Margaret Jull Costa on La Casa (“The House”) by Manuel Mujica Lainez