It often happens that the most mythologized are the inglorious geniuses, the creators who do not end up enjoying that popular success that elevates them in life to the altars of the massive recognition of their art or dedication.
Roberto Arlt he died shortly after forty having immersed himself in avant-garde too advanced for his time. Today its glory is a common space revisited from the recognition of the greatest self-proclaimed heirs as Julio Cortazar o Roberto bolaño.
So today we can all value that literary career of an Arlt who made a brilliant whim of his narrative. On the one hand, formal experimentation, on the other, a manifesto of that deep existentialism of the narrator determined to give his characters a philosophical charge to turn them into everyday antiheroes faced with constant nemesis, a transcendent decision, a cynical vision of everything from the satiety. Such a Emil cioran to Argentina.
And yes, we can throw away the hackneyed resource and end up labeling it a "cult author." The point is that if this is how we serve the cause of differentiation, of pointing to a literature as brilliant as it is disconcerting, then yes, let's "worship" it.
Top 3 recommended novels by Roberto Arlt
The Rabid Toy
As Arlt's initial work and literary takeoff, we can also deduce an initiatory point in the philosophy of the antihero born from punishment and ignominy, from oblivion and contempt. Because everything begins in childhood and youth.
The world is composing its mosaic according to how life is lived in those initial phases in which, in the worst case, we can learn that everything that surrounds us is a combat where we will have to lose. The lyricism of defeat is the responsibility of an author who demonstrates the sensitivity of someone who dreams of explanations for almost everything from the intellectual point of view and ends up discovering that the pandemonium of our reality is made up of contradictions and trompe l'oeils that cloud reason.
The protagonist of The Rabid Toy, an almost autobiographical novel that reflects the chaos of the early twentieth century in Buenos Aires, is Silvio Astier, a teenager expelled from school, who lives his poverty as a humiliation, and vainly tries to escape from it at all coast, sinking more and more into dark pessimism as he fails in his attempts. In an environment saturated with sinister and mean characters, as well as absurd and desperate situations, the young man is the object of contempt and intolerance around him, without being able to emerge from an oppressive society. The Rabid Toy is one of the key works to understand Arlt's work.
The mad seven
Existentialism underlies the everyday and the transcendental, it is the same substrate on which the groundwater of our passage through the world passes. The same way that Proust He looked for his lost time and reflected it in his imperishable most extensive work, Roberto Arlt made an exercise of introspection and later projection towards the particular circumstances that the author had to live. Uprooting and social criticism covered everything with that emotional lyricism at times, and even gloomy in its final bars. Everything was closed in two installments, in the first some of the problems posed by philosophical existentialism are developed.
Moral issues, loneliness, anguish at the meaninglessness of life and the desolation of death are recurring themes in the metaphysical architecture of its protagonists. In the second installment called the flamethrowers, Arlt devastates everything like napalm capable of turning the existence of the seven madmen or any other peering into ashes at the pretentious idea of ​​flying over their miseries.
El amor brujo
Any intense emotion that lifts us above the mundane is a spell that keeps us haunted. Living the unreality is not lucid at all and yet it is as desirable as it is strange because of the detachment from reason that it entails.
After its appearance as a nineteenth-century novel, El amor brujo tells the tragicomedy of a bourgeois, Estanislao Balder, who, in order to overcome his bland existence, embarks on a love affair as sweet as it is clumsy. Subtle and unpredictable, you have to go all the way to gauge the scope of the criticism, whose acidity uncovers the seemingly satisfied foolish man.
In this latest novel by Arlt, more than in any other, the weaknesses and resentments that urged this "Quilombo François Villon", as Cortázar defined him, are manifested and those "unappealable and telltale images" that put us in front of ourselves and our shameful weaknesses.
