The Mad Toy

El juguete rabioso is the first novel that tried to infuse the avant-garde tendencies in the Latin-American prose and it does it with mixed results. Today the innovations of this novel seem terribly antiquated and cliché, like the utilisation of the street slang in the dialogues and attempts to describe the new urban culture. Its content also tries to touch taboo themes like masturbation and homosexuality, but it merely scratches at the surface. Its psychological approach is also lumpy, the internal monologues are still too tied to the traditional autobiographic form. Still many people like it, maybe because it has some reminiscences with the picaresque form, as it tells the story of a boy growing up in Buenos Aires, and the younger generation can identify with the protagonist's problem whether to succumb to the system or not. Like the picaresque novels, the story-line here is also a string of anecdotes, but it my opinion it is too fragmented, it leaves to many things unclear, jumps over too many details, not always telling what you want to hear. Maybe then it all seemed groundbreaking and it must have confused the literati as not many similar books followed its style. Still as many of the works of the different styles of the avant-garde in the literature, like the futurism or expressionism, contrary to its original intentions, it can still have some antiquated charm for some.

The first novel of the great argentinian writer Roberto Arlt is like a bullet coming straight to your head. All the anger and envy that a human being can have is condensed here. Originally released at the late 20, it has not lost any of his incredible power. You can't expect less from the author of "Los siete locos". JUL