if you haven’t been a “neighbourhood boy” have you ever lived?

#Madtoy

I loved the first chapter, band of thieves, it made me remember the many teenage bands of thieves I was part of, the shenanigans, dozens of interactions with police, detained, arrested, jailed, theft, deaths, murder. Silvio stands with his band of thieves, loaded up with stolen lightbulbs and books at 3 am in the rain, “in a halo of pride and courage”. Heaven is being in a teenage band, you just live each moment, changing plans on a whim in the darkness of naiveté. This scene reminded me of an old rock song “3am and I think it’s raining”

, a jumble of thoughts as Silvio even thinks of his old girlfriend Leonor. It all seems very real for me.

The writing was different from Proust; the first paragraph was a running sentence but not a single comma! Silvio and his band have an ethnic dialect, are working class, growing up on the streets, motivated by the timeless adolescent dream of curiosity and fame, expressed though alcohol, adventure, crime, and relationships. Silvio is a working class “plaything of the city” and in the end the city absorbs him, another selfish rat, tired of the “force of life,” having destroyed his friend to find joy, content now to exist. Arlt wrote a “society newspaper column” for years aiming to shock his readers and this novel reflects his familiarity with working class life and delight in throwing it up for the nice people who read in their suburban engineer maid and cook furnished bedrooms.

The pace and dialogue are fast, as with life on the streets, the band reconfigures with diverse people even an older mulatto maid, showing the pointlessness of diverse lives. Silvio is fed up with his job selling paper, work to eat, eat to work, every day the same, how does life make sense? This timeless theme, teenagers today feel the same, they see their parents miserable at jobs, commuting, eating, mindlessly working late or on their phones barely interacting with family and friends until special occasions. The second chapter starts out more hopeful, as the family has moved and his band of thieves gone, Silvio has found a job, then thinks he has found a better job, but it falls through, more disappointment. Similarly, the next chapter, he is hired for his brains, then fired because his boss only wants dumb people. His old friend Lucio reappears to affirm that “a guy’s gotta go straight, that’s life.” Silvio realizes that he must kill himself if he wants to live. Incredible insight for a teenager, as the Engineer corroborates at the end of the novel, that in life you do not belong to yourself. I feel such sadness when this working-class dream and struggle to get ahead is brutally halted, but Arlt has captured this without hysteria, so an enjoyable read.