Sin Rumbo

Sin Rumbo (1885) is widely recognized as one of the pioneering works of Argentine naturalism and a key text in the transition from romanticism to modern narrative in Latin America. In this novel, Eugenio Cambaceres applies a rigorously naturalist gaze to the life of Andrés, a wealthy, liberal, “modern” estanciero whose inner emptiness and moral decay expose the darker side of the triumphant Generation of 1880.

Andrés, rich and educated, should embody the liberal ideal of progress and rational leadership. Instead, he drifts between the estancia and Buenos Aires, violating the peasant girl Donata, pursuing an affair with opera singer Marietta Amorini, and ultimately confronting the brutal loss of his illegitimate daughter Andrea. Trapped in ennui and Schopenhauerian pessimism, he cannot transform his privilege into ethical action; his final suicide—while his wool shearing literally burns—becomes a devastating metaphor for a decadent patriarchy leading the nation “without direction.”

In his extensive introduction, J. P. Spicer‑Escalante situates Sin Rumbo within the French and Argentine debates on naturalism, reconstructing Cambaceres’s own aesthetic theory from his correspondence. The novel emerges as both a bold aesthetic innovation and a sharp social critique of liberal Argentina at the height of its agro‑export boom. Ideal for courses on naturalism, modernity, and the crisis of the liberal project in Latin America, this edition helps students read Sin Rumbo as a “scientific” dissection of a ruling class in moral and psychological crisis.