Seix Barral restores the eight novels of the unique Argentine storyteller who stayed outside the currents and canons
Manuel Puig (1932-1990) was a ‘rara avis’ of Spanish letters. The Argentine writer started publishing with the outbreak of the Latin American ‘boom’, a movement he never fit in. Original, different, daring and innovative, his story went beyond traditional schemes and was slowly recognised. Readers and cinema welcomed Puig’s ever-brave and other novels better than their own peers and critics, which Seix Barral is now recovering.
The writers of the ‘tree’ never saw a match in Puig, though he, like them, was a catalyst for the sleepy Spanish literature of the time. He was stigmatized as an upstart, a non-literary author whose critical and independent leftism and his overt homosexuality also shrieked. The most conservative critics disdained a story that straightforwardly incorporated references from popular culture, film, pop art, soap operas or current affairs magazines.
But 90 years after his birth and 32 after his death, the author of “The Kiss of the Spider Woman” or “Boquitas Pinturas” is still a living reference. Yes, Mario Vargas Llosa despised him, although he eventually praised him, Roberto Bolaño considered him a genius and dedicated his posthumous novel “The Problems of the Real Policeman.” David Foster Wallace recognized Puig’s defining influence on his work and Murakami considers him a soul mate.
Seix Barral began the rescue of his eight novels before the summer, which will end in September. The first five are already in bookstores: ‘The betrayal of Rita Hayworth’, ‘Boquitas pintadas’, ‘The Buenos Aires Affair’, ‘The kiss of the spider woman’ and ‘Pubis angelical’. They are prologued by Bob Pop, María Dueñas, Mario Mendoza, Antonio Muñoz Molina and Camila Sosa. In September ‘Eternal Curse to Whoever Read This Pages’, ‘Blood of Reciprocated Love’ and ‘Cae la noche tropical’ will be released, with prologues by Tamara Tenenbaun, Claudia Piñeiro and Paulina Flores.
The grandson of the Catalan and Galician Puig was born in Coronel Villegas, a town in the humid Argentine Pampas, five hundred kilometers from Buenos Aires. The son of a winegrower and a nurse, he soon became aware of his sexuality. The fashion magazines his mother bought and the cinema were his lifeline against the provincial machismo and bullying he escaped as quickly as possible.
He settled in Rome in 1956 on a scholarship to study film. In 1963 he settled in New York. There he worked for Air France and wrote a script that would become “The Betrayal of Rita Hayworth”, the first autobiographical novel, set in the imaginary town of Coronel Vallejos and told through the eyes of Toto, a boy who dreams of a world of fantasy, beautiful celluloid women and housewives.
In 1967 he returned to Buenos Aires and tackled ‘Boquitas pintadas’ and awarded ‘La traición de Rita Hayworth’ in Spain for the Biblioteca Breve prize, which would win Juan Marsé’s ‘Last afternoons with Teresa’ after a technical draw. Luis Goytisolo, member of that jury, chose Puig and Vargas Llosa for Marsé. “It is very unliterate and the author writes like Corín Tellado,” would say the future Nobel Prize winner for Literature, who years later would lavishly praise Puig’s originality. The novel was a success in France and catapulted the Argentine. Also ‘Boquitas pintadas’, filmed by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, was scorned at the Primera Plana prize by another giant of the ‘boom’, Juan Carlos Onetti, who said he did not know what Puig’s style was, although he was very knew well how they spoke and their characters wrote letters.
Puig enters the police genre with ‘The Buenos Aires Affair’. It mixes the inner monologue and flirts with psychoanalysis in a black story where the reader is the detective. The prevailing Peronism felt appealed, censored the novel and accused Puig of being anti-Peronist. Threatened to death by the Triple A vigilante and anti-communist group, he fled to Mexico and never returned to his country.
‘The Spider Woman’s Kiss’, his most political novel in which he confronts a guerrilla and a homosexual in prison, seduced Hector Babenco, a Brazilian filmmaker who made the film a huge worldwide success. Gallimard, the label that had published all of Puig’s books in France, did not release it, arguing that the combination of homosexuality and Marxism ran counter to the editorial line. But ‘The Spider Woman’s Kiss’ was Puig’s definitive international dedication, who adapted it for the theater at the request of Spanish actor Pepe Martín, who premiered it with Juan Diego and was directed by José Luis García Sánchez.
Puig, who relocated to the United States and then Brazil, published “Pubis angelical,” “Eternal curse on whoever reads these pages,” and “Blood of reciprocated love,” in which this novel features the protagonist’s voice in a love story. directly transcribed, madness and death. In 1988, after the publication of ‘Cae la noche tropical’, Puig lived in Italy for two more years until he moved to Cuernavaca, where he died in 1990 of peritonitis. He was not a victim of AIDS, which then raged as its enemies spread.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
