El escritor, las sombras y la Patria: En esta dulce tierra de Andrés Rivera

the novel en esta dulce tierra sets up a historical pretense that disintegrates into several endings. the title is an irony, since terrible events take place in this "sweet land." it refers to the literature of the xix century, especially to the founding romances such as that of josé mármol's amalia. the nation is envisioned as a closed space relegated by despotism to the asylum, the morgue, the jail, the basement. the characters live an illusion moving from north to south. if sarmiento invokes the shadow of facundo, rivera evokes some of his own shadows in cufré, doubles in different times and spaces. the narration of the argentine history is a story of defeat: civilizarion's. the historical image is pessimistic: the world is ill, blood thirsty and violent. facundo is the shadow of barbarity, the emblem of the american nature, the produce of the riojan plains. cufré is the shadow of an "educated" class whose trajectory draws a paradox. both are victims of a land conceived in one case as a barbarous nature, and in the other as sinister homeland. power acts in this land as a second nature with the taste of death.