Recommendations
Books Like Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen)
Books for readers who loved Arlt's explosive Buenos Aires avant-garde nightmare
Roberto Arlt's 1929 Los siete locos is the dark counterweight to Borges in Argentine literature — Erdosain, a humiliated petty criminal, joins the Astrologer's revolutionary conspiracy in a Buenos Aires of tenements, resentment, and explosive energy. These eight books share its quality: the novel of urban humiliation and explosive resentment, the lower-class anti-hero who finds meaning in conspiracy, and the Latin American tradition of the formally reckless, emotionally extreme novel.
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Buy on AmazonCrime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Raskolnikov's combination of superior intelligence, social humiliation, and violent action is Erdosain's situation in nineteenth-century Petersburg — the underground man as the source of Arlt's explosive anti-heroes.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The underground man's resentful self-analysis is Arlt's Erdosain in concentrated form — the man who has been humiliated by everything and whose only response is violent thought or conspiracy.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Trial
by Franz Kafka
The arbitrary humiliation of a man who does not understand why — the Kafkaesque atmosphere of social oppression and inexplicable persecution that Arlt renders in Buenos Aires rather than Prague.
- 4
Buy on AmazonHunger
by Knut Hamsun
A young man in a city, humiliated by poverty and powerlessness but refusing to capitulate — the direct Scandinavian model for the explosive first-person voice that Arlt translated into Argentine lunfardo.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño is Arlt's heir — young writers in Mexico City with grandiose ambitions and conspiratorial energy; the avant-garde movement as a collective delusion that is also genuine; the same mixture of excitement and futility.
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Buy on Amazon2666
by Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño's most Arltian work — the anarchic structure, the city as a zone of violence, the sense that something enormous and terrible is happening but no one understands it.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Wrestle with the Devil
by Ernesto Goldar
Argentine popular fiction of the same period — the Buenos Aires of the 1920s lunfardo culture that produced Arlt's linguistic texture.
- 8
Buy on AmazonNausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Roquentin's existential disgust at the world — a different philosophical vocabulary for the same condition as Erdosain's: a man whose consciousness has become a prison and who finds in action (however irrational) the only release.
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