Seven Madmen

The Seven Madmen is the sort of work that never seems to lose its impact. Even 80 years after its original publication, there's something uniquely unsettling about Arlt's account of one man's involvement in a bizarre criminal conspiracy. The man in question, Remo Erdosain, finds himself in trouble at the beginning of the novel. His bosses at The Sugar Company have figured out that he has been embezzling, and give him a day to return the money he has robbed. To make things worse, when he gets home, he learns his wife is leaving him for another man.

Desperate, he seeks out the help of a man who goes under the moniker of The Astrologer, a strange figure obsessed with criminal conspiracies and the overthrow of the established order. He is soon drawn into the Astrologer's strange plan, in which are involved several other strange characters, including Hafner, a math professor turned pimp whom people call “The Melancholy Ruffian,” an army Major and the Gold Seeker.

I remember the first time I read it, I found it sort of disappointing, perhaps because it ends so abruptly with a “To be continued...” This time around, I found myself drawn more into its unique and nightmarish character. Of particular note is The Astrologer, which has struck me as one of the most intriguing characters in literature, up there with Ahab or Heathcliff. With his fascination for political philosophies, his deep cynicism and his strange schemes, he seems like a foreshadowing of the rise of men like Hitler, Stalin or bin-Ladin. The whole conspiracy he heads strikes similar strange tones, with each participant seeming to have their own strange scheme at play as well.

Arlt's description of the city is wonderfully evocative, and he draws heavily on the smells of the city as well as a pervading sense of darkness. It struck me as having interesting parallels with film noir, in which shadows are part of the atmosphere of moral decay.