Mad Toy

Mad Toy (original title: El juguete rabioso: "The rabid toy") is the first novel of Argentinean author Roberto Arlt. Published in 1926 by Editorial Latina, it is markedly autobiographical in nature. The original manuscripts were written in the 1920s and were drafted by Arlt in the mountains of Córdoba, in a time when his wife, Carmen, who suffered complications from tuberculosis, needed to move to the mountains to recover from her illness. Arlt invested a considerable amount of money in businesses that did not grow, and had to accompany his wife, so he began work on "Mad Toy'.

Upon his return to Buenos Aires, Arlt tried to publish his novel in the “Los Nuevos” (The New”) collection of the publisher Claridad, but the editor of the collection, Elías Castelnuovo, did not like the book. It was then when chance brought him to Ricardo Güiraldes, who, after hearing readings of the book, encouraged Arlt to continue looking for a publisher, and gave him a job as a secretary.

The book is narrated in first person and is cleanly constructed. The apprenticeship of the protagonist, Silvio Astier, develops in four separate episodes. In the first, “The Band Of Thieves,” Silvio, influenced by reading melodramas, and, perhaps more, by his deplorable position in society, founds the “Club of the Gentlemen of Midnight” with two other adolescents, which is dedicated to petty theft in the neighborhood. After a failure, the club stops its activities.

In the second, “Work and days,” Silvio, after moving neighborhoods, finds work at a bookstore and moves to the house of don Gaetano, the owner of the store. There he sees terrible scenes of meanness and suffers several humiliations. At the end he tries to burn the bookstore that he works in, but fails and then leaves his post.

In the third, “Mad Toy,” Silvio tries to attend the School of Aviation as a mechanic’s apprentice. At first he is accepted, and the school directors are surprised at his brilliance, but later, suddenly, they expel him, because they say they do not need intelligent people, but brutes for work. Following this, Silvio lives through a strange adventure with a homosexual in a miserable hotel room. After leaving, he buys a revolver and tries to commit suicide, but he fails at this too.

In the fourth part, “Judas Iscariote,” the protagonist, a little older, has become a door-to-door paper salesman, a job that seems as vile and humiliating as all of his previous employments. He meets one of his partners in the “Club of the Gentlemen of Midnight” who has become a detective and “regenerated” in the fight for life.

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Wikipedia