Manuel Puig

This article is about the Argentine author. For the Animal wrangler, see Manny Puig.

Manuel Puig (born Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne) (General Villegas, Argentina, December 28, 1932 - Cuernavaca, Mexico, July 22, 1990) was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1969) (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.

Life

Manuel Puig was born in General Villegas (in Buenos Aires province). After unsuccessfully studying architecture in the Universidad de Buenos Aires, he began working as a film archivist and editor in the city of Buenos Aires and later, in Italy after winning a scholarship from the Italian Institute of Buenos Aires. Puig's dream was to become a screenwriter to write TV shows and movies. His career as a screenwriter never took off, however. In the 1960s, he moved back to Buenos Aires, where he penned his first major novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth. Because he had leftist political tendencies and also foresaw a rightist wave in Argentina, Puig moved to Mexico in 1973, where he wrote his later works (including El beso de la mujer araña).

Much of Puig's work can be seen as pop art. Perhaps due to his work in film and television, Puig managed to create a writing style that incorporated elements of these mediums, such as montage and the use of multiple points of view. He also made much use of popular culture (for example, soap opera) in his works. In Latin American literary histories, he is presented as a writer who belongs to the Postboom and Post-modernist schools.

Puig lived in exile throughout most of his life. In 1989 Puig moved from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he died in 1990. In the official biography, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fiction, his close friend Suzanne Jill Levine writes that Puig had been in pain for a few days prior to being admitted to a hospital, where he was told that his gallbladder was inflamed and would have to be taken out. After the surgery, while Puig was recovering, he began to choke and gasp. The medical team was unable to help Puig. His lungs had filled with fluid, and he died of a heart attack at 4:55am on July 22,1990.

Work

Critic Pamela Bacarisse divides Puig work into two: his early novels, which "attracted an enormous audience by weaving into his narratives the artistic 'sub-products' of mass culture"; and his later books which have "lost their popular appeal" as they evidence "a depressing, even unpalatable, vision of life, no longer even superficially sweetened by palliatives as the mass-media elements are left behind".

List of works

Novels

• 1968 – La traición de Rita Hayworth; English translation: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971)
• 1969 – Boquitas pintadas; English translation: Heartbreak Tango (1973)
• 1973 – The Buenos Aires Affair; English translation: The Buenos Aires Affair (1976)
• 1976 – El beso de la mujer araña; English translation: Kiss of the Spider Woman (1979)
• 1979 – Pubis angelical; English translation: Pubis angelical (1986)
• 1980 – Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas; English translation: Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1982)
• 1982 – Sangre de amor correspondido; English translation: Blood of Requited Love (1984)
• 1988 – Cae la noche tropical; English translation: Tropical Night Falling (1991)

Plays and screenplays

• Bajo un manto de estrellas (1983) (Under a Mantle of Stars)
• El beso de la mujer araña (1983) (Kiss of the Spider Woman)
• La cara del villano (1985)
• Recuerdo de Tijuana (1985)
• Vivaldi: A Screenplay (1991) (in Review of Contemporary Fiction №3)
• El misterio del ramo de rosas (1987) (Mystery of the Rose Bouquet)
• La tajada; Gardel, uma lembranca (1997)

References

• Bacarisse, Pamela (1988), The necessary Dream: A Study of the Novels of Manuel Puig, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ISBN 978-0708310113.
• Levine, Suzanne Jill (2000), Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 978-0374281908.

External links

• Manuel Puig at Find a Grave