The Seven Madmen

A weird wonder of Argentine and modern literature, a crucial work for Julio Cortazar (“If there’s one person in my country I feel close to, it’s Roberto Arlt”),The Seven Madmen begins when its hapless and hopeless hero, Erdosain, is dismissed from his job as a bill collector for embezzlement. Then his wife leaves him and things only go downhill after that. Erdosain wanders the crowded, confusing streets of Buenos Aires, thronging with immigrants almost as displaced and alienated as he is, and finds himself among a group of conspirators who are in thrall to a man known simply as the Astrologer. The Astrologer has the cure for everything that ails civilization. Unemployment will be cured by mass enslavement. (Mountains will be hollowed out and turned into factories.) Mass enslavement will be funded by industrial-scale prostitution. That scheme will be kicked off with murder. “D’you know you look like Lenin?” Erdosain asks the Astrologer. Meanwhile Erdosain struggles to determine the physical location and dimensions of the soul, this thing that is causing him so much pain.

Brutal, uncouth, caustic, and brilliantly colored, The Seven Madmen takes its bearings from Dostoyevsky while looking forward to Thomas Pynchon and Marvel Comics.

Roberto Arlt (1900–1942) was born in Buenos Aires, where he lived for his entire life as a journalist, inventor, and fiction writer. In addition toThe Seven Madmen, he was the author of the novels The Enraged Toy, The Flamethrowers, and Love the Enchanter, and several plays.

Nick Caistor has translated some forty books from Spanish, Portuguese, and French, including works by Eduardo Mendoza, Paulo Coelho, and Manuel Vazquez Montalban. He has been awarded the Valle Inclan Prize for Spanish Translation twice and is the author of the biographies Che Guevara: A Life, Fidel Castro, and Octavio Paz. He is also a regular contributor toThe Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. He lives in the United Kingdom.