Manuel Puig

Manuel Puig (1969)

Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne , better known as Manuel Puig , (born December 28, 1932 in General Villegas , Argentina , † July 22, 1990 in Cuernavaca , Mexico ) was an Argentine writer and filmmaker.

Life

Manuel Puig, called “Coco” in the family, was born as the son of Baldomero Puig (“Baldo”) and María Elena Delledonne (“Malé”) in the small provincial town of General Villegas, which was the scene of several of his novels as “Coronel Vallejos” .

Puig became interested in film at a very early age and has been going to the cinema with his mother regularly since he was four. In order to better understand North American films, he began to learn English when he was ten. In 1944 his younger brother Carlos was born, who later became a painter. A year earlier, his mother had been stillborn. Since higher education was not possible in the province, his parents moved with him to Buenos Aires in 1946 , where he attended the Colegio Ward.

After briefly enrolling in architecture, he studied literature from 1951 at the University of Buenos Aires .

In 1956 he received a scholarship and studied at the film school of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome . He later worked as a Spanish and Italian teacher as well as a dishwasher and wrote his first scripts. Between 1961 and 1962 he worked as an assistant for films in Buenos Aires and Rome.

In 1963 he moved to New York and wrote his first novel La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), which he completed in 1965. In December of the same year, the novel was proposed for the prestigious Spanish literature prize Biblioteca Breve by the Seix Barral publishing house. In 1969 his novel was recognized by the newspaper Le Monde as the best work of 1968/1969.

In 1967 Puig returned to Buenos Aires. After the success of his second novel Boquitas pintadas (The Most Beautiful Tango in the World), his third novel The Buenos Aires Affair was published in 1973 , which was later banned by the Argentine military dictatorship. After repeated threatening phone calls, Puig left Argentina and settled in Mexico, where he completed El beso de la mujer araña (The Spider Woman's Kiss) in 1976 . In 1985 Leonard Schrader wrote the screenplay for the award-winning film Kiss the Spider Woman by Héctor Babenco . In 1979 Manuel Puig published Pubis angelical (The Angels of Hollywood), which became a bestseller in Spain and was filmed by Raúl de la Torre . In 1980 the author moved to Brazil , where he lived for the next ten years. In 1988 his last novel, Cae la noche tropical (When the tropical night fell) was published. Shortly before his death he bought a house in Cuernavaca ( Mexico ), where he wanted to settle with his elderly mother, but he died unexpectedly a little later from an operation on the bladder.

On his death, Puig left the unfinished novel Humedad relative 95% .

Although Puig is now counted among the great Argentine authors, he was hesitant to find recognition. The way in which he combined elements of mass culture with avant-garde stylistic devices was often criticized, especially in Argentina, and many saw his works as trivial literature . His breakthrough came with El beso de la mujer araña . Puig stayed away from the literary business all his life and also from other Latin American writers of the nueva novela hispanoamericana such as Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez . Vargas Llosa mimicked Puig's style in his novel La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Art Writer), in which he assembled high-level literature and kitsch .

Puig's novels are strongly shaped by his own experiences. The place where his first two novels are set, Coronel Vallejos, is very reminiscent of his own birthplace, General Villegas. Puig: “ Everything was flat. Only the sky was very bright and the air very dry. The town was ugly, too. To all intents and purposes it was living in exile. Everyone born there never goes away and has no idea what life is or what there is in the world. When my mother took me to the cinema for the first time - I was four - I thought: That's where life is. It all seemed so real to me. ”(Quoted from: Pamela Bacarisse: The necessary dream. A study of the novels of Manuel Puig. Cardiff 1988.)

The promises of the films and the tango for the boring and colorless characters in the Argentine provinces are the defining themes in Puig's first novels. Social and sexual oppression are subtly portrayed by Puig. In the figure Totos in La traición de Rita Hayworth and in the figure of the transsexual Molina in El Beso de la mujer araña , the author finds himself as a self-confessed homosexual and thus processes his own experiences of the suppression of homosexuality.

Works

Novels

• La traición de Rita Hayworth . Buenos Aires: Jorge Álvarez, 1968 (Colección narradores argentinos). English: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth . Novel. [1. Aufl.] Frankfurt / M., [1976] (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch, 344) ISBN 3-518-06844-X , ISBN 3-518-36844-3
• Boquitas pintadas : Folletín . Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969 (The Most Beautiful Tango in the World: A Continuation Novel) ISBN 3-518-36974-1
• The Buenos Aires Affair: Novela policial . Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1973
• El beso de la mujer araña . Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976 (The Spider Woman's Kiss) ISBN 3-518-37369-2
• Angelical pubis . Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979 (The Angels of Hollywood) ISBN 3-518-03974-1
• Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas . Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981 (Damn who reads these lines) ISBN 3-518-39063-5
• Sangre de amor correspondido . Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982 (Heart and Blood of Returned Love) ISBN 3-518-03577-0
• Cae la noche tropical . Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1988 (When the tropical night fell) ISBN 3-518-40732-5
• Los ojos de Greta Garbo . Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1993
• Estertores de una década. Nueva York '78 . Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1993
• Humedad relative 95% . 1991 (unfinished)

theatre

• Bajo un manto de estrellas Pieza en dos actos. 1988 (Under the Stars)
• Triste golondrina macho (obra en dos actos). Amor del bueno (comedia musical). Muy señor mío (musical con boleros). 1988
• Gardel: Uma lembrança . 1993
• El misterio del ramo de rosas . 1998
• Madrid 37 (unfinished)

In German translation

• The most beautiful tango in the world: a serial novel . From the chip. by Adelheid Hanke-Schaefer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1975 (paperback edition: 2001, Suhrkamp paperback 3186)
• Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: Novel . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1976 (Suhrkamp-Taschenbücher 344)
• The Spider Woman's Kiss: Roman . From the chip. by Anneliese Botond. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1979 (paperback edition: 1995, Suhrkamp paperback 2541)
• The Angels of Hollywood: Novel . From d. Chip. by Anneliese Botond. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1981 (paperback edition: 1985, Suhrkamp paperback 1165)
• Heart and soul of returned love: Roman . From the brasilian. Portuguese. by Karin von Schweder-Schreiner. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1985 (paperback edition: 2000, Suhrkamp paperback 3106)
• Under a starry canopy . German by Dagmar Ploetz . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Theaterverlag, 1986.
• Damn who reads these lines: Roman . From the chip. by Lieselotte Kolanoske. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1992 (paperback edition: 1996, Suhrkamp paperback 2563)
• When the tropical night falls: novel . From the chip. by Lieselotte Kolanoske. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1995.

Filmography

• Boquitas pintadas . 1974
• El lugar sin límites . 1978 (screenplay based on the novel by José Donoso )
• Angelical pubis . 1983 (Music Charly García )
• La cara del villano. Recuerdo de Tijuana . 1985 (script based on the story by Silvina Ocampo El impostor ).
• El beso de la mujer araña . 1985 (screenplay with Leonard Schrader)
• Los siete pecados capitales . 1986 (screenplay with David Weissman)
• Happy together (The Buenos Aires Affair) . 1997
• Tango music . (unpublished script)

literature

• Manuel Puig: Una aproximación biográfica . A multimedia biography on CD-ROM. Buenos Aires 2008. ISBN 978-987-05-4332-9

Web links

Commons : Manuel Puig  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Manuel Puig in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Manuel Puig in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Manuel Puig in the Internet Movie Database (English)