Roberto Arlt

Roberto Arlt wrote the novels of Buenos Aires from below and was despised in his lifetime for writing badly, which is now considered the point. He was the son of poor Prussian and Italian immigrants, was thrown out of school at eight, and worked as a shop assistant, dock hand, painter and mechanic while reading translations of Dostoevsky and inventing things - he held a patent on a run-resistant stocking. He worked as a journalist, and his Aguafuertes portenas, short daily pieces for the paper El Mundo, are among the best accounts of the city in the 1920s and 1930s. The Rabid Toy and The Seven Madmen are his novels: clerks, swindlers, anarchists and inventors plotting revolution and financing it with brothels, in a Buenos Aires of poverty, humiliation and lunatic schemes. His prose is full of lunfardo slang and immigrant syntax, and the literary establishment around Borges and the Florida group treated him as illiterate. He answered in a preface that while they were writing elegantly he was writing in the middle of a boarding house with the neighbours shouting. The Semana Tragica of 1919, when the army and civilian gangs killed hundreds of striking workers and carried out a pogrom in the Jewish quarter, is the political background his fiction grows out of. He died of a heart attack at forty-two, and his reputation has risen steadily since. Cortazar, Onetti and Piglia all claimed him as an ancestor, and Piglia argued that Argentine literature runs through Arlt rather than through Borges. His plays were staged by the Teatro del Pueblo. The stocking patent never made him any money.

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