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 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. It 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 elite who struggles with the idea of killing a single man. As the novel opens, Erdosain is accused of stealing 600 pesos He is willing to repay the money, but no one will lend him the money to do so. 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. Eventually, 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 ... 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 deranged. These our men 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. The reader realizes 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. 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 the book to find out.)
Author
Roberto Arlt was an Argentine writer born Roberto Godofredo Christophersen Arlt in Buenos Aires on April 2, 1900. His parents were both immigrants: his father Karl Arlt was a Prussian from Posen (now Poznan in present-day Poland) and his mother was Ekatherine Iobstraibitzer, a native of Trieste and Italian speaking. German was the language commonly used at their home. His relationship with his father was stressful, as Karl Arlt was a very severe and austere man, by Arlt's own account. The memory of his oppressive father would appear in several of his writings. For example, Remo Erdosain (a character at least partially based on Arlt's own life) often recalls his abusive father and how little if any support he would give him. After being expelled from school at the age of eight, Arlt became an autodidact and worked at all sorts of different odd jobs before landing a job on at a local newspaper: as clerk at a bookstore, apprentice to a tinsmith, painter, mechanic, welder, manager in a brick factory, and dock worker. His first novel, El juguete rabioso (1926) ("Mad Toy"), was the semi-autobiographical story of Silvio, a dropout who goes through a series of adventures trying to be "somebody." Narrated by Silvio's older self, the novel reflects the energy and chaos of the early 20th century in Buenos Aires. The narrator's literary and sometimes poetic language contrasts sharply with the street-level slang of Mad Toy's many colorful characters. Arlt's second novel, the popular Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) was rough, brutal, colloquial and surreal, a complete break from the polite, middle-class literature more typical of Argentine literature (as exemplified, perhaps, by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, however innovative his work was in other respects). Los lanzallamas (The Flame-Throwers) was the sequel, and these two novels together are thought by many to be his greatest work. What followed were a series of short stories and plays in which Arlt pursued his vision of bizarre, half-mad, alienated characters pursuing insane quests in a landscape of urban chaos. During his lifetime, however, Arlt was best known for his "Aguafuertes" ("Etchings"), the result of his contributions as a columnist - between 1928 and 1942 - to the Buenos Aires daily "El Mundo". Arlt used these columns to comment, in his characteristically forthright and unpretentious style, on the peculiarities, hypocrisies, strangeness and beauty of everyday life in Argentina's capital. These articles included occasional exposés of public institutions, such as the juvenile justice system ("Escuela primaria de delincuencia", 26–29 September 1932) or the Public Health System. Some of the "Aguafuertes" were collected in two volumes under the titles Secretos femeninos. Aguafuertes inéditas and Tratado de delincuencia. Aguafuertes inéditas which were edited by Sergio Olguín and published by Ediciones 12 and Página/12 in 1996. Between March and May 1930, Arlt wrote a series of "Aguafuertes" as a correspondent to "El Mundo" in Rio de Janeiro. In 1935 he spent nearly a year writing as he traveled throughout Spain and North Africa, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. At the time of his death, Arlt was hoping to be sent to the United States as a correspondent. Worn out and exhausted after a lifetime of hardships, he died from a stroke on July 26, 1942. His coffin was lowered from his apartment by an operated crane, an ironic end, considering his bizarre stories. Arlt has been massively influential on Latin American literature, including the 1960s "Boom" generation of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. Analogues in English literature are those who avoid literary 'respectability' by writing about the poor, the criminal and the mad: writers like William Burroughs, Iceberg Slim, and Irvine Welsh. Arlt, however, predated all of them. He is widely considered to be one of the founders of the modern Argentine novel; among those contemporary writers who cla
