La gran aldea

La gran aldea (1884) is Lucio V. López’s ambitious attempt to portray and synthesize the transformation of Buenos Aires and its inhabitants in the three decades following the fall of Rosas. Written rapidly in serial form, on the same desk where López drafted his polemical political articles, the novel bears traces of haste in style—but those very imperfections help capture the urgency and texture of a society in flux.

Grandson of Vicente López y Planes and son of Vicente Fidel López, Lucio Vicente López combined a classical education with intense political training. He famously characterized Argentine society as “beótica,” intuiting that the fertility of the pampas and easy wealth would more likely produce political imperfections—Beotia—than a new Athens, despite the young country’s economic dynamism. A member of the Generation of 1880, columnist for Sarmiento’s newspaper El Nacional and later supporter of Juárez Celman, López nonetheless maintained the critical distance to perceive the need for a regenerating civic movement, which he glimpsed in Leandro Alem’s Unión Cívica.

La gran aldea is also a “novela de clave”: many Argentine political figures can be recognized under thinly veiled names. Don Buenaventura is Bartolomé Mitre; Bonifacio de las Vueltas, Bernardo de Irigoyen; don Benito, Juan Carlos Gómez, the Uruguayan liberal journalist who clashed with Mitre over the Paraguayan War. The plot is romantic and morally “edifying,” in keeping with the fashion of the time: evil—whether attached to repulsive ugliness or seductive beauty—is ultimately punished. The true value of the novel, however, lies in its costumbrista fresco of porteño society, highlighting traits that, as the backcover notes, “still persist for the observant eye” today.