🇦🇷 "El Juguete Rabioso" de Roberto Arlt||Reseña Original de Marabuzal -ESP-ENG-

Me fui a la Habana nada más abrir el siglo y ya han pasado 25 años. Iba a estudiar Literatura y llevaba, en mi equipaje de avión, un recorte de periódico con no recuerdo qué, y en el corazón toda el hambre que un joven puede tener para hacerse escritor. Allí por primera vez oí hablar de Roberto Arlt y de su novela “El juguete rabioso”.

Me la recomendaron como el reverso sucio y genial de todo lo que la academia consideraba "Literatura" con mayúsculas. Y al leerla, entendí que había algo mucho más vibrante y real en aquella prosa.

I went to Havana just after the turn of the century, and now 25 years have passed. I was going to study Literature and in my airplane luggage, I carried a newspaper clipping with I don't remember what, and in my heart, all the hunger a young man can have to become a writer. There, for the first time, I heard talk of Roberto Arlt and his novel "El juguete rabioso" (Mad Toy).

It was recommended to me as the dirty and brilliant reverse of everything the academy considered "Literature" with a capital L. And upon reading it, I understood that there was something much more vibrant and real in that prose.

“Mad Toy” is a hoarse cry, let out by a furious autodidact who wrote at the same speed he lived. Roberto Arlt, with a prose he himself defended as "rough and without euphemisms," introduces us to Silvio Astier, a young man who is the embodiment of misery and ambition in early 20th-century Buenos Aires. Silvio is neither a rogue nor a hero. He is what we would call a degraded dreamer, a poet in failure who drags his hunger for greatness through the slums, the mechanic workshops, and the old bookstores.

The tone Arlt uses to tell his story is one of resentment, of restless intelligence. It is the frustration of a young man who feels his genius is trapped by the mediocrity of his class. Silvio wants to be an illustrious anarchist, a generous bandit, an inventor of contraptions that will free him from his destiny. But his attempts, from the creation of the "Club of the Midnight Gentlemen" to his bungled robberies, always end in ridicule or pathetic failure.

What makes this novel immortal is its absolute honesty about modern neurosis. Arlt does not idealize poverty or crime. He shows the anguish of a young man in a city modernizing by leaps and bounds, leaving behind those with neither capital nor connections. Silvio Astier is perhaps the first existential anti-hero of Latin American literature; a Raskolnikov from the slums who isn't trying to justify a crime, but to justify his own existence. His interior monologues are filled with a dark lyricism, revealing a brilliant mind rotting from a lack of opportunity.

The novel's structure, divided into four chapters that almost read like independent stories, reflects the fragmented and erratic nature of Silvio's life. The climax of this degradation comes in the final chapter when he is forced to betray his friend, the "Melancholy Man," whom he denounces in a desperate attempt to secure a future as a soldier in a barracks. This betrayal, far from being an act of pure evil, is the final surrender of an idealist. Silvio cannot be the honorable bandit he dreamed of; all that is left for him is to be a petty traitor... to survive.

Just like that "hunger to be a writer" that I carried in my suitcase to Havana, "Mad Toy" is a novel that speaks of that very same need: the need to name reality with a painful truth. Arlt's legacy lies in having opened the door to the language of the street, to lunfardo slang, to the obsessions of the city. His influence on the Latin American Boom and all subsequent narrative is undeniable. The best literature is born not in the peace of tradition, but in the "rage" against it. It is, in essence, the novel that taught me that true poetry is sometimes found in the rawest chronicle of failure. Twenty-five years have passed, but the unhinged voice of Silvio Astier remains the soundtrack of youth searching for itself in the asphalt.

Thank you for reading me.

_{Google Translation}