Diana Sosa Cárdenas, Ejército y sociedad en Venezuela (1813-1823), Caracas, AB Ediciones/UCAB, 2023, 258 pp

Abstract

After Ayacucho, Enrique Bernanrdo Núñez's second novel, published in 1920, is remembered only as an initial and more or less erratic step in the career of one of the great classics of Venezuelan literature. Without any of the aesthetic proposals that dazzle in Cubagua, it is rather a follet in which the then young journalist seemed to gather many of the ideas he already had on Venezuelan history and politics, rehearsing things that over the years he developed in works that critics have considered more successful. For its spirit it reminds us of Los Ayacuchos by Benito Pérez Galdós, which he almost certainly read; and for its plot it reminds us of En este país by Luis Manuel Urbaneja Achelpohl, which was a book that everyone knew in Venezuela. But this does not make the thesis he points out any less enlightening.