The Seven Madmen

By -
The Seven Madmen, by Roberto Arlt

Why did I pick this novel?  Well, it came along and I was looking for an Argentinian title that wasn't Borges.  I love Borges!  But I thought I ought to branch out a bit.  And this has a pretty intriguing title, plus I had heard of Erdosain before.  Upon such frail whims are my reading choices based.

Background: this novel was written around 1929, thus before anything I know about Argentinian history.  No Peron yet.  (Probably Hercule Poirot's buddy Hastings is running a cattle farm somewhere!)  The Depression hasn't even begun yet.

Erdosain is a hapless guy who is getting fired from his sad little job as a bill collector.  He embezzled 600 pesos* and he's got to pay it back right away.  Then his wife leaves him, and all he's got left is this awful cousin he hates.  Erdosain wanders the streets of Buenos Aires and meets up with a bunch of guys, most of whom are pretty strange, but the strangest of all is the Astrologer, leader of a burgeoning cult.  He plans to take over, and talks to his various followers in their own languages.  Communists think it will be a Red revolution; militarists think they'll be in charge, and so on.**  He'll get rid of unemployment by enslaving everyone, and fund it all with prostitution on a massive scale.  The seed money will come from Erdosain's annoying cousin, who they'll murder for his bank funds...

I can't say I really enjoyed this novel.  I finished it because it was short and I was already halfway through anyway.  It's a very 'guy' novel, and most of the guys are horrible people, and you know what, I just have a hard time stomaching novels where characters wax poetic about the beauty found in the suffering of prostitutes.  I'm sure it's a great classic of modernity but no thank you.

_______________________________


*600 pesos does not sound like much to a contemporary person, but it turns out to be quite a lot in 1929 Argentina.  A couple thousand bucks maybe.

**And again, I think of Agatha Christie, in Destination Unknown/So Many Steps to Death.


Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more