Manuel Puig, a talented fictional freak despised by the ‘boom’

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Manuel Puig, the Argentine writer with Spanish descent. / efe

Seix Barral recovers the eight novels of the unique Argentine narrator who remained outside currents and canons

Miguel Lorenzo

Manuel Puig (1932-1990) was a ‘rara avis’ of Hispanic letters. The Argentine writer began to publish with the outbreak of the Latin American ‘boom’, a movement in which he never fit. Original, different, daring and innovative, his narrative surpassed traditional schemes and was slow to be recognized. Readers and cinema welcomed Puig’s always brave and different novels better than their own colleagues and critics, which Seix Barral is now recovering.

The writers of the ‘boom’ never saw an equal in Puig, even though he was, like them, a catalyst for the sleepy Hispanic literature of the time. He was stigmatized as an upstart, a non-literary author in which he screeched, moreover, his critical and independent leftism and his open homosexuality. The most conservative critics disdained a narrative that uncomplicatedly incorporated references from popular culture, cinema, 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 “Painted Mouths” is still a living reference. Yes, Mario Vargas Llosa disdained him, although he ended up praising him, Roberto Bolaño considered him a genius and dedicated his posthumous novel, ‘The troubles of the true policeman’, to him. David Foster Wallace recognized Puig’s determining influence on his work, and Murakami regards him as a soul mate.

Seix Barral began the rescue of his eight novels before the summer, which will culminate 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 Reads These Pages’, ‘Blood of Reciprocated Love’ and ‘Cae la noche tropical’ will arrive, with prologues by Tamara Tenenbaun, Claudia Piñeiro and Paulina Flores.

Grandson of 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 vintner and a nurse, he was soon aware of his sexuality. The fashion magazines that his mother bought and the cinema were his lifesaver against provincial machismo and harassment from which he escaped as soon as he could.

He settled in Rome in 1956 on a scholarship to study cinema. 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 narrated through the eyes of Toto, a boy who dreams of a world of fantasy, beautiful celluloid women and housewives.

Returning to Buenos Aires, in 1967 he tackled ‘Boquitas pintadas’ and presented ‘La traición de Rita Hayworth’ in Spain for the Biblioteca Breve Prize, which would win ‘Last afternoons with Teresa’, by Juan Marsé, after a technical tie. Luis Goytisolo, a member of that jury, opted for Puig and Vargas Llosa did for Marsé. “It is very unliterary and its author writes like Corín Tellado”, would say the future Nobel laureate in Literature, who years later would lavishly praise Puig’s originality. The novel was a success in France and catapulted the Argentine. Also ‘Boquitas pintadas’, made into a film by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, was disdained in the Primera Plana award by another giant of the ‘boom’, Juan Carlos Onetti, who said he did not know what Puig’s style was although he knew very well how they spoke and their characters wrote letters.

threatened

With ‘The Buenos Aires Affair’ Puig enters the police genre. She mixes interior monologue and flirts with psychoanalysis in a noir story in which the reader is the detective. The ruling Peronism felt alluded to, censored the novel and accused Puig of being anti-Peronist. Threatened with death by the Triple A vigilante and anti-communist group, he fled to Mexico and never returned to his country.

‘The kiss of the spider woman’, 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 great global success. Gallimard, the label that had published all of Puig’s books in France, did not take it out, arguing that the combination of homosexuality and Marxism contravened her editorial line. But ‘The Spider Woman’s Kiss’ was the definitive international consecration of Puig, who adapted it to the theater at the request of the Spanish actor Pepe Martín, who premiered it with Juan Diego and directed by José Luis García Sánchez.

Settled again in the United States and then in Brazil, Puig published ‘Pubis angelical’, ‘Eternal curse on whoever reads these pages’ and ‘Blood of reciprocated love’, directly transcribing in this novel the voice of the protagonist in a story of love, madness and death. In 1988, after publishing ‘Cae la noche tropical’, Puig lived another two years in Italy until he moved to Cuernavaca, where he died in 1990 due to peritonitis. He was not a victim of AIDS, which was then raging, as his enemies spread.

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