For answers to frequently asked questions, please visit this page. And, seasick, I returned to my bunk. But like a painter who begins a massive canvas with a few tentative dabs of paint, Arlt emerges from his cabin two hours later, ready to unleash an enormous freight of description:. My own first image of Rio de Janeiro was somewhat less prosaic. This man, and his surroundings, made for a jarring contrast from the city I thought awaited me.
I had come, like I suspect many visitors do, expecting the postcard view of the bay, of the beaches, from the first moment of my arrival.
It was only when I returned to Rio three years later and read Arlt for the first time that I began to grasp that the distance between expectation and reality, between hope and disappointment, animates and haunts the experience of the outsider to a foreign country.
When I spontaneously decided to join my partner, an American journalist, in Rio in March of , I knew very little about the city beyond what I had seen on that first trip. At the time, the country was convulsed with massive street protests against corruption: the night we met, we narrowly avoided being teargassed after a roving group of teen anarchists—followed shortly thereafter by riot police—ran through the neighborhood where we were having dinner.
In , I quit my job with the newswire in New York without a backup plan; I was desperate for an adventure and low on cash. Though we had only been dating for a few months, my partner agreed to split an apartment with me through the end of the Olympics, which would be hosted in in Rio. Arlt was born in Buenos Aires in to recently arrived and near-destitute European immigrants. His first novel, El Jugete Rabioso The Mad Toy was published in ; by , journalism had become his main source of income.
