As a boy, Silvio Astier dreams of becoming a noble bandit, a rejected poet, or a great inventor. However, his zest for life continually collides with the humiliating existence in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. When he feels cheated out of all possibilities, he pushes his life to the brink through the betrayal of a friend: a self-rescue through evil. A bitterly disharmonious coming-of-age novel that celebrates the fury of being alive; a harsh cut into a social fringe reality in an expressive, radically subjective language - this is "The Evil Toy" from 1926, with which the literary outsider Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) revolutionized the South American novel: disturbingly alive even today.