Ways of reaching Arlt: the encounter with a work that is a “cross to the jaw”

“The first thing that struck me when I read ‘Los siete locos’, ‘Los Lanzallamas’, was the very figure of Roberto Arlt. That writer who came from another side, who had to, due to the arrogance of his work, make a place for himself in Argentine literature, moved me,” says Saítta.

After reading the novels, his research grant, as a student of the Arts major, was about Arlt. In those two novels, which Arlt thought of as a unit, there were many of the themes and many of the questions that interested him: the dislocated links between literature and politics.

“That look so hopeless that Arlt has with respect to sentimental relationships or affective ties, the city of Buenos Aires as a great stage of Argentine literature, that stage that is both so well known by those who were born in Buenos Aires like me, but at the same time so far from a realistic representation of that Buenos Aires,” he enumerates.

He was also struck by the fact that “this newcomer to the world of what we would call ‘high culture’ is the spokesperson for the great discussions that not only Argentina but the world was going through at that time.”

Pierini came across Arlt based on a compilation published by Losada and although he admits that he never stopped being read, he stresses that “until (Ricardo) Piglia arrived to make a reconstruction of that work, he did not have the impulse that his writing has since obtained”.

While Quereilhac tells that his bond with Arlt was born from “The rabid toy” (1926). “I read it at the age of 14, when I was the same age as the protagonist, Silvio Astier, who is, paradoxically, an avid reader and who is also discovering part of the world through his readings. It is, in its strange way, a learning novel, and I was also learning (and suffering) a lot at that age. The encounter with the novel was a very beautiful moment, because my second-year literature teacher gave it to me. She wrote me such a loving and thoughtful dedication to which I might have liked that, unforgivably, I decided to take it out of the book to keep it as a letter and I ended up losing it. I looked for it for years, even when I was older and after several moves. One day I had come to the classroom telling him that I had read ‘The Metamorphosis’, by Franz Kafka, a book from my father’s library. And I remember confessing that, although I had found a lot of pleasure in reading it, especially because of how it was written and because of the challenge that it implied to look at the world through the eyes of a human ‘dawn’ cockroach, the truth is that he had understood almost nothing. A week later, she called me aside at recess and gave me ‘The Rabid Toy’.”

“The novel would never have entered the curriculum of that school, which was religious and very conservative; the gift was his decision, outside of his ‘obligations’ to put it brutally. Without knowing it (or was it?), he introduced me to one of my favorite authors, to whom I frequently return when I teach Argentine literature programs at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters,” he acknowledges.

Later, at the age of 17, he discovered Buenos Aires etchings, “thanks to a gift from a fifth-year classmate from another high school, already a layman.” “I did not know how to value them at the time, but shortly after, when I was studying Literature, I returned to them and I was fascinated. They are priceless, they are truly marvelous and in them, River Plate Castilian sounds like no other text,” he says.