Manuel Puig Biography and List of Works

Argentine writer and motion picture scriptwriter who gained international fame with the publication of his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), which was made into a film in 1985. The story depicts two prisoners - one a younger political radical, the other a middle-aged homosexual - who reveal their souls through retelling the romantic plots of old movies.

As a writer Puig was a pessimist - several of his characters die or live their lives totally disillusioned, for example Toto the child-protagonist of LA TRAICIÓN DE RITA HAYWORTH (1968, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth). Although there is no overt social criticism, the frustrated tone of the novel provides an indirect commentary on the years in which Juan Perón was climbing to power.

"At another level, Betrayed is a record of the oral languages spoken by a very definite segment of the Argentinean people during a period of the country's history. If the emotional and even the imaginative alienation of the characters is shown through their way of elaborating fables out of books or movies, their everyday speech demonstrated how deep the roots of that alienation have gone, because it is a tissue in which is imbedded the contemporary language of serialized novels, popular biographies, soap operas, movie subtitles, plus the rhetoric of the politicians and the pseudo-intellectual utterances of journalists."
(from World Authors 1975-1980, ed. by Vineta Colby, 1985)

Puig was born in General Villegas in the remote Argentine pampas, where he spent his childhood and received his elementary education. As young boy Puig used films to escape from the environment and learned English in the process. In 1946 Puig moved to Buenos Aires where he attended a US boarding school and began to study architecture, eventually changing this for the study of philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires.

In 1955 Puig went to Rome after receiving a scholarship to study film directing and film technique, with Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Puig was disappointed - film making at the Cinecittà was not to his tastes. He travelled to Paris and London, where he worked as a teacher and washed dishes. In 1959 he lived in Stockholm and then returned to his home country. From 1957 to 1961 Puig was an assistant film director and translator of subtitles in Rome, Paris and Buenos Aires. During this time Puig had began to write film scripts. He moved to New York City to experience Broadway musicals while working for Air France from 1963 to 1967.

Puig returned to Buenos Aires in 1967. He was a visiting lecturer at Columbia University, New York, in 1973-75 he lived in Brazil, then in New York (1976-80). Puig did not stay in Argentina many years. He felt the atmosphere of his home country oppressive. Juan Peron's widow had succeeded to the presidency on her husband's death in 1974, and this added to Puig's avowed distaste for Argentine political policy. Because of Isabelita Perón's personal intervention, he had received no royalties for the film of BOQUITAS PINTADAS and many of his later books had been harshly criticized. In the 1980s Puig was based in New York and Rio de Janeiro and in 1989 he settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Puig's first novel, the semi autobiographical Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968), portrayed the realities of Argentine life and a young boy who escapes his boredom by fantasizing about the lives of the stars he has seen in motion pictures. For his novels exploring sexuality and for his overt homosexuality, Puig was condemned as immoral. He was also criticised for his attacks on family, religion and class structure'. During his career he suffered many disappointments, including a hostile off-Broadway reception of the musical version of his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman. The film version, directed by Hector Babenco, starring William Hurt, Raul Julia, and Sonia Braga, also failed to capture the spirit of the novel. However, Hurt won an Oscar for his performance as Molina, a homosexual, who has nothing in common with his cellmate Valentin, a revolutionary imprisoned for political beliefs.

In the late 1980s critics started to appreciate Puig's dismissal of the 'great divide' between mass culture and 'serious' art. He translated most of his works into English and also wrote in that language. He died in Mexico on July 22, 1990.

For further reading: World Authors 1975-1980, ed. by Vineta Colby (1985); Suspended Fictions by Lucille Kert (1987); El Discurso utópico de la sexualided en Manuel Puig by Elías Muñoz (1987); The Necessary Dream by Pamela Bacarisse (1988); Impossible Choices by Pamela Bacarisse (1993)

LA TRAICIÓN DE RITA HAYWRTH, (1968)