Roberto Arlt is the author of El juguete rabioso (Mad Toy), 1926; Los siete locos (Seven Madmen), 1929; and Los lanzallamas (Flamethrowers), 1931. He was a columnist and reporter and often wrote about life in Argentina from the mundane to the insane. Arlt is considered a seminal writer and had a huge influence on the “Boom” generation. He is known for his “anguished, half insane” characters. Arlt died in 1942 at the age of 42.
On June 26, 2018, River Boat Books re-issued Naomi Lindstrom’s translation of The Seven Madmen. On that same date, we released Larry Riley’s translation of The Flamethrowers. We had originally intended to publish these two half-novels in a single volume, which would have been historic. Well that historic day has finally arrived. On January 9, 2022, we released Madmen in Revolt: The Seven Madmen & The Flamethrowers (the Complete Novel), by Roberto Arlt.
A Summary of the Book
Madmen in Revolt contains Roberto Arlt’s complete masterpiece: The Seven Madmen & The Flamethrowers, combined in a single volume for the first time in history. The Seven Madmen is the first half of this masterpiece and The Flamethrowers is its second half.
The story begins with of a seminal group of madmen in 1920s Buenos Aires intent on blowing up the world. This story is in fact about the end of humanity, of what it means to be human, and the central character in this Beckettian tragedy is Remo Erdosain, a man obsessed with technology, a man who is at war with a world controlled by corrupt elites, and yet struggles with the idea of killing a single man.
The first book (Seven Madmen) focuses on Erdosain who, as the novel opens, is accused of stealing 600 pesos from his boss. Erdosain is willing to repay the money, but in order to do this he needs to borrow money, but no one will lend him anything. He does receive a check from a stranger named Haffner, but suddenly it seems that Erdosain lives in an alternate reality. In fact he has entered the world of the absurd as defined by Camus (the divorce between a man and his life, between meaning and reality). Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Erdosain meets The Astrologer, who instead of giving Erdosain money, convinces Erdosain that what the world needs is a new secret society devoted to revolution, and, what is even more astonishing, this new society needs Erdosain to participate in a plot to kidnap the thug Barust in order to extort money to finance its operations.
One by one we are introduced to the seven madmen who will participate in this dream of a new world, but it soon becomes clear that the dream itself is a madness and that each of the madmen suffer from their own peculiar (absurdist) form of insanity. The Astrologer, for instance, is mostly intent on developing a series of bizarre inventions: weaponizing the Asiatic cholera bacillus, adapting steam engines to run by electromagnetics, and copperplating roses, to name three. By the end of the first book, the only thing the reader is certain of is that the story is not yet concluded. The Astrologer says: ““What we call madness is just new thoughts people aren’t used to. Look, if that guy over there were to tell you everything he had on his mind, you’d have him put away. Of course, there should only be a few like us…the big thing is for our actions to bring us vitality and energy. Yonder lies salvation.” We realize that the seven madmen have not yet found salvation. And Arlt himself says the novel will continue with a second book titled The Flamethrowers.
In The Flamethrowers, the seven madmen try to bring their dream/nightmare vision of revolution to fruition, and the notion of anything resembling salvation disintegrates before our very eyes. Erdosain, caught between the desire for purity and the need to humiliate, murders his fourteen-old bride. The group’s plans to annihilate civilization become more technologically specific and more psychologically desperate, even deranged. These men are isolated and marginalized by the external world. The inner realities each member of the group has created, realities characterized by games and fantasies, plots and conspiracies, have led to increased isolation from the world. As readers our window into this fantasy turned reality is jarring; we understand that we have entered the abyss, a place of technological terrors where our very sense of morality is abandoned.
Towards the end of the novel, a jaundiced, fully uniformed (gasmasked!) soldier appears to Erdosain at night and they engage in a rather blasé conversation about gasses that reveals Erdosain’s belief in the efficacy of phosgene as a mass murdering agent. Their conversation, like the rest of the novel, underscores the horrible truth that the abyss we fear is at the very center of the human soul. This is the end of civilization, at least as far as Arlt is concerned. We are provided a basic understanding of the aberrant behavior (the what but not truly the why), but there is no accompanying political or moral epiphany.
What happens to the revolutionary vision of The Astrologer? What happens to Erdosain and the rest of the seven madmen? Perhaps it is best to say that the answer lies somewhere between fantasy and reality. (In other words, you’ll have to read Madmen in Revolt to find out.)
Translated by Naomi Lindstrom & Larry Riley
574 pages; list price: Trade paperback $19.95 U.S.
ISBN: 978-1-955823-11-1
Release date: January 9, 2022
(This book is available worldwide for $19.95 US plus 6% taxes and $3.00 shipping.)
PRAISE FOR ROBERTO ARLT
“Let’s say, modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ.” —Roberto Bolaño
“Roberto Arlt is one of our greatest visionaries . . . writing for him is cauterization, acid that etches, a magic lantern projecting, one after another, glass slides depicting a cruel city and its men and women condemned to live permanently on the prowl, like dogs, . . . . that is art, like the art of a canyengue Goya (Arlt would have punched me in the face if he read this), of a street-fighting Francois Villon, of a Kit Marlowe wielding his knife in taverns. . . art that puts us face to face with ourselves, as only great art can.” —Julio Cortazar (translated by Katherine Silver)
If ever anyone from these shores could be called a literary genius, his name was Roberto Arlt. … I am talking about art and of a great and strange artist. … I am talking about a writer who understood better than anyone else the city in which he was born. More deeply, perhaps, than those who wrote the immortal tangos. I am talking about a novelist who will be famous in time … and who, unbelievably, is almost unknown in the world today. —Juan Carlos Onetti
“As Erdosian’s fantasies blur into reality, we are treated to a world reminiscent of the intense Georg Grosz paintings of sex murderers… Arlt’s magnum opus will lure new readers into a keenly rendered dystopia where official facts and psychic fictions tend to change places. His dark imagination uncannily foretold the impending political milieu.” —Publishers Weekly
“So firmly rooted was Arlt in the explosive urban society and political culture of his time that his book is able to illuminate what was actually to happen during the first Peronist era in the 1940s and in the country’s later descent into violence in the 1970s after Juan Peron had returned as President for the last time. It is one of the great books of the 20th century.” —The Guardian
“[Arlt] wryly memorialized the polyglot vitality of Buenos Aires as a menacing objective correlative of his own—and, by extension, modern man’s—alienation and psychic disintegration.” —Kirkus Reviews
