Manuel Puig

This article is about the Argentine author. For other uses, see Puig (disambiguation).

Manuel Puig
250px Manuel Puig
Born	(1932-12-28)December 28, 1932 General Villegas, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
Died	Cuernavaca, Mexico
Occupation	Novelist, screenwriter
Nationality	Argentinian
Literary movement	Postboom, Post-modernist

Manuel Puig (born Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne) (December 28, 1932 – July 22, 1990) was an Argentine 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 adapted as the film Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), directed by the Argentine-Brazilian director Héctor Babenco; and as the Broadway musical Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993).

Early life, education and early career

Puig was born in General Villegas, Buenos Aires Province. After unsuccessfully studying architecture in the University of 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 television shows and movies. His career as a screenwriter never took off, however.

Writing career

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 4:55 a.m. on July 22, 1990.

The 2004 film Vereda Tropical, directed by Javier Torres, depicts the period when Puig lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The writer's role is played by the actor Fabio Aste.

Work

Critics such as Pamela Bacarisse divides Puig's work into two parts: 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".

Three translations of his work have been reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press:

• 2009: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth
• 2010: The Buenos Aires Affair
• 2010: Heartbreak Tango

List of works

Novels

• 1968: La traición de Rita Hayworth
  • Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Translator Suzanne Jill Levine, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-56478-530-5
• 1969: Boquitas pintadas; Seix Barral, 2004, ISBN 978-950-731-430-8
  • Heartbreak Tango
• 1973: The Buenos Aires Affair (The Buenos Aires Affair)
• 1976: El beso de la mujer araña; José Amícola, Jorge Panesi, Editors, Fondo De Cultura Economica, 2002, ISBN 978-84-89666-45-0
  • Kiss of the Spider Woman, reprint Random House, Inc., 1991, ISBN 978-0-679-72449-0
• 1979: Pubis angelical (Pubis Angelical) Seix Barral, 1979, ISBN 978-84-322-1379-3
• 1980: Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas (Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages)
• 1982: Sangre de amor correspondido (Blood of Requited Love)
• 1988: Cae la noche tropical (Tropical Night Falling)

Plays and screenplays

• 1983:
  • Under a Mantle of Stars: A Play in Two Acts, Lumen Books, 1985, ISBN 978-0-930829-00-1
• 1983: El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman)
• 1985: La cara del villano (The Face of the Villain)
• 1985: Recuerdo de Tijuana (Memories of Tijuana)
• 1991: Vivaldi: A Screenplay (in Review of Contemporary Fiction №3)
• 1997: El misterio del ramo de rosas (1987) (Mystery of the Rose Bouquet)
• 1997: La tajada; Gardel, uma lembranca

See also

• List of Argentine writers
• List of LGBT writers
• List of playwrights

External links

• A Conversation with Manuel Puig (Interview took place during a weekend in September 1979, after Puig was part of a Congress of Hispanic-American Writers in Medellin, Colombia.)
• Manuel Puig at Find a Grave
• Manuel Puig: Una aproximación biográfica. Eine Multimedia-Biographie auf CD-ROM. Buenos Aires 2008. ISBN 978-987-05-4332-9