Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) was an Argentine writer, journalist, playwright and inventor. Born to immigrant working class parents (Prussian father, Italian mother) he grew up with German as a mother tongue. Arlt is a distinctive literary voice, with a unique and accented prose, and a remarkable sensitivity for tales of the underworld and the plight of the urban wretched — this is a sensitivity he perfected working as a crime reporter.
At the time Arlt was writing, literature in Argentina was the métier of the well-off, as mostly everywhere else. We live in different times now, and if literature once suffered from the disease of aristocracy it now suffers from the disease of professionalism (real or pretend). In either case, Arlt’s words in the prologue to his novel Flamethrowers — here in my own translation — offer hope of a literature sans bullshit, where the written world is born out of an uncontrollable urge to write. And nothing else.