Mad ToyRoberto Arlt, celebrated in Argentina for his tragicomic, punch in the jaw writing during the 1920s and 1930s, was a forerunner of Latin American boom and postboom novelists such as Gabriel Garca Mrquez and Isabel Allende. Mad Toy, acclaimed by many as Arlts best novel, is set against the chaotic background of Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century. Set in the badlands of adolescence, where acts of theft and betrayal become metaphors for