Los siete locos Reading Order

Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen, 1929) by Roberto Arlt is the strangest and most disturbing novel of the Argentine avant-garde — a portrait of Buenos Aires in the 1920s through the eyes of Erdosain, a petty criminal and failed inventor who becomes involved in a revolutionary conspiracy organized by a madman known as the Astrologer. The conspiracy is almost certainly a fraud; the revolution may or may not happen; the Astrologer may be a visionary or a charlatan; and Erdosain, humiliated by his wife, his employers, and the world, finds in the chaos of the conspiracy something like meaning. Arlt is the great counterweight to Borges in Argentine literature: where Borges is cosmopolitan, erudite, ironic, and aesthetically conservative, Arlt is provincial in origin, self-educated, formally reckless, and emotionally extreme. His Buenos Aires is not the elegant European city of the literary elite but the tenements, cafés, brothels, and police stations of the lower middle class — a world of failure, humiliation, and explosive resentment that Arlt renders in a prose mixing literary Spanish, Argentine lunfardo (slang), and journalistic directness that his contemporaries found vulgar and that later generations recognized as a founding achievement. The Seven Madmen is continued in Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers, 1931), and the two novels should be read as one work.