I bought this book because it was published by NYRB and it had a preface by Julio Cortazar. I don't regret the decision, but if I had read the first 50 pages in the book store, I don't know if I would have bought this book for $16 USD + tax.

The general premise is interesting enough -- Erdosain gets caught stealing from his job; he finds a plot to pay that back + become involved in a master plan to install communist brothels across the world. All it will take is one murder. Lots of talk about "big men" having to remove "small men"-- the inconsequentiality of one murder in the face of glorious revolution. Okay, okay. And then the psychological mining that Arlt gives us to show the deliberation over the idea... the intertwining of individual, apolitical actors contributing to larger-than-life schemes. Okay, okay.

In typing this out, I almost WANT to finish the book. But the actual act of reading it is not the most enjoyable. Maybe there is something lost in translation. Or maybe it's that I've read the same things elsewhere, i.e. Dostoyevsky. But we can do downstream Dosto without being this... boring? Right? A few years ago, I read Avenue of Giants by Marc Dugain, and it conjured up many of the same feelings I have towards Madmen. But whereas Giants is an exciting read... a real page turner for literary standards, that doesn't keep you at the edge of your seat with unpredictable action, but with turning prose and cutting, poignant thoughts throught... Madmen feels meandering. It has an almost improvised quality that I occasionally detect in Latin 'Boom' authors (I don't know if Arlt is part of that, but I felt the same feelings reading Fuentes, so there you go).

I would like to finish the book-- I would like to see how Erdosain ends up-- I would like to see if Arlt has a larger conclusion that speaks to the emptiness of man, the decisions made to be larger than a mite-- but so much of that is mired down by tiring writing, midcentury manspeak about women (why are there always prostitutes?), and just general BORINGness. Maybe it's the pacing-- maybe I would do better to take some adderall or whatever equivalent and run through the books roughly 250 pages to leave me less time to wonder if I'm enjoying it or not.

jamr

jamr