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| The Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt – review | The Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt – review |
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| This 1926 novel hustles us through the backstreets of Buenos Aires in the company of a thieving adolescent high on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Silvio dreams of fame as an inventor; instead he's grafting with petty crooks and failing to quench the memory of a hastily spurned girlfriend while his mother nags him to get a job. His hectic narrative stays nowhere for long: Silvio puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger – but it's only one of several apparently irretrievable acts swiftly forgotten once the next chapter begins. | This 1926 novel hustles us through the backstreets of Buenos Aires in the company of a thieving adolescent high on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Silvio dreams of fame as an inventor; instead he's grafting with petty crooks and failing to quench the memory of a hastily spurned girlfriend while his mother nags him to get a job. His hectic narrative stays nowhere for long: Silvio puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger – but it's only one of several apparently irretrievable acts swiftly forgotten once the next chapter begins. |
| Roberto Arlt was born in Argentina in 1900, a year after Borges, but on the other side of the tracks from his better known compatriot; he had to fend for himself early in life, turning later to fiction when he wasn't at his day job as a reporter. If, like many debuts, El juguete rabioso contains a streak of autobiography, then Arlt had experience of a fair few trades besides journalism. The unsettling sense that anything can happen erupts frequently in sudden violence: Silvio tries to set fire to his boss's house and flings a lit cigarette "on to some human bundle that was hunched in a shop doorway", just because. Even the surprisingly high-minded conclusion seems somehow amoral, when Silvio snitches on an accomplice, foiling plans for his biggest robbery yet. | Roberto Arlt was born in Argentina in 1900, a year after Borges, but on the other side of the tracks from his better known compatriot; he had to fend for himself early in life, turning later to fiction when he wasn't at his day job as a reporter. If, like many debuts, El juguete rabioso contains a streak of autobiography, then Arlt had experience of a fair few trades besides journalism. The unsettling sense that anything can happen erupts frequently in sudden violence: Silvio tries to set fire to his boss's house and flings a lit cigarette "on to some human bundle that was hunched in a shop doorway", just because. Even the surprisingly high-minded conclusion seems somehow amoral, when Silvio snitches on an accomplice, foiling plans for his biggest robbery yet. |
| James Womack's fizzy translation yo-yos between the high-flown and the low-slung as befits a cocktail of surreal dream sequences and down-and-dirty naturalism. The quick-fire dialogue appears boldly (and justifiably) in an unstuffy modern idiom: Silvio and his friends speak of "pissheads" and "losing it" and "going off on one". While I don't know the Spanish for "who ate all the pies?", I'm guessing I wouldn't learn it from Arlt. | James Womack's fizzy translation yo-yos between the high-flown and the low-slung as befits a cocktail of surreal dream sequences and down-and-dirty naturalism. The quick-fire dialogue appears boldly (and justifiably) in an unstuffy modern idiom: Silvio and his friends speak of "pissheads" and "losing it" and "going off on one". While I don't know the Spanish for "who ate all the pies?", I'm guessing I wouldn't learn it from Arlt. |
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