Juan Filloy's 'Op Oloop': A Statistical Obsession Unravels

Éditions Monsieur Toussaint Louverture has published Juan Filloy's novel 'Op Oloop', originally written in 1930s Argentina. The story follows Optimus Oloop, a Finnish statistician in Buenos Aires whose life is governed by method and precision. Oloop, described as 'the only son of method and perseverance', has turned his home into an archive of statistical charts covering topics like plywood trade versus Argentine fertility rates. He is engaged to Franziska, a consular finance expert, but also maintains 999 descriptive files on prostitutes he has visited. The novel traces the final 18 hours and 10 minutes of Oloop's life as his mechanical existence collapses when he encounters love, leading to a psychotic breakdown and suicide. Sigmund Freud admired the novel as a detailed account of psychic collapse. The work is considered a possible missing link between psychological novels and 'reasoned imaginary novels' as described by Jorge Luis Borges in his preface to Adolfo Bioy Casares's 'The Invention of Morel'. 'Op Oloop' was immediately labeled pornographic upon its Argentine publication and is seen as a distorting mirror of 1930s Argentine society, which had just experienced a coup d'état. The novel marked a turning point in Argentine literary history.