Manuel Puig

Manuel Puig born 28 December 1932 (d. 1990)

Manuel Puig was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1973) (Heartbreak Tango), and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian Director, Héctor Babenco, and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.

Puig was born in General Villegas, an isolated town in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, on December 28, 1932. As a child, bored by the provincialism of his surroundings, the young Puig would go to the local moviehouse five nights a week to be entertained by the glamour of Hollywood movies.

After completing his elementary education, Puig was sent to boarding school in Buenos Aires. In 1950, he entered the University of Buenos Aires, first studying philosophy then architecture, but never obtained a degree.

In 1956, he was awarded a scholarship to study film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and from 1956 to 1962 he moved back and forth between Rome, London, and Argentina, attempting, unsuccessfully, to get his film career off the ground.

In 1963, abandoning hope of a career in cinema, he moved to New York City where he began to work on his first novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth. The novel was published in Argentina in 1968 but not after first running into censorship problems as a result of the portrayal of the protagonist Toto as effeminate and sexually ambivalent.

In 1969, the prestigious French publisher Gallimard issued the French translation of La traición de Rita Hayworth, and in June of that year the work was selected by Le Monde as one of the best novels of 1968-1969. After this recognition, Puig became one of the most admired and popular authors in Latin America.

Although Puig also published plays and film scripts, he is most recognised in Latin-American letters today for the innovative techniques of his novels. The Argentine writer can perhaps be classified as one of Latin America's first post-modern authors. He is responsible for breaking through to a post-modern, unpretentious literary space where so-called low-brow culture - Hollywood movie stars, soap opera, popular radio serials - is considered as valid an indicator of personal and collective truths as high-brow art.

In 1973, while living in Greenwich Village, Puig began to write his fourth novel, the story of two cellmates in a Buenos Aires prison during Argentina's military dictatorship of the 1970s. Luis Alberto Molina, an aging homosexual convicted of 'corrupting minors', is a modern-day Scheherazade who recounts and recreates filmed stories to seduce a young Marxist political activist, Valentín Arregui Paz.

The novel is the now classic El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a commercially successful Hollywood film in 1985, and has also been adapted for the stage, both as a drama (in Spanish and in English) and as a Tony Award-winning musical.

Although homosexual themes and motifs are suggested in a number of Puig's novels, in El beso de la mujer araña explicit homosexual desire is central to the fiction.

When it first appeared, the open portrayal of homosexuality in El beso de la mujer araña was unsettling for many members of the Hispanic literary establishment who found it difficult to accept an openly gay novel. Yet, though it was considered a flop with intellectuals and critics, the novel, nonetheless, gained popularity and eventually became a best-seller.

By portraying the gay Molina as sympathetically complex, Puig counteracted the Hispanic world's intolerance toward homosexuality.

When Manuel Puig died in 1990 at the age of fifty-seven, the New York Times obituary reported that he had suffered cardiac arrest following a routine gall bladder operation. What was most puzzling, however, was that the obituary mentioned Puig's two 'sons', thus making him appear to have been heterosexual. Stories have since surfaced erroneously indicating that Puig's death may have been AIDS-related and his real cause of death covered up.