Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman by Suzanne Jill Levine

Author:Suzanne Jill Levine [Levine, Suzanne Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Its structure did impress certain literati, but, most important, Heartbreak Tango appealed to many readers; with its tragicomic plot about characters presented both as private individuals and members of their social class, it was social realism made fun. The novel had something for everyone: romance, sex, humor, suspense, nostalgia, all as experienced by real people, consumers of soap operas and cursi love songs. It was almost “hyperrealist” in its reproduction of an era and a place, in its mimicry of the way people, especially women, think and feel.

It opened the gates to Colonel Vallejos, providing the reader with a guide to the even richer emotional content of the first novel. Reviews and interviews appeared in quick succession, and Sudamericana rushed to bring out its edition of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, which became a best-seller in Argentina in 1970. Manuel appeared on the cover of magazines all over town: in one photo he was wearing his leather jacket, imagining (he told a friend) that motorcyclists would find him sexy as they stopped for the light at a busy corner and caught a glimpse of his photo at a kiosk. Rosita “Frou Frou” Bailón, a fashion designer at the Galería del Este who was almost as campy as the characters in the novel, named a line of forties-style platform shoes “Boquitas pintadas”; the “hottest” Argentine media celebrities clamored to star in the film version planned by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson and Beatriz Guido. Manuel's peers envied his ability to invent a novel about the people, for the people, and, in a sense, by the people. “There are two elements that need to coincide for me to write a book,” as Manuel later analyzed his writerly urges:

I have to feel a need to exorcise certain personal obsessions. There are others I have no need to exorcise. Each of us has his own little masochistic game, and wants to continue with certain tortures until death, but there are some tortures of which I do say “enough of this already.” But I don't write a novel—since for me it's not only about writing but about communicating—if I have the sensation that that problem is not shared. That is, I'm interested in situating myself as one more victim of the collective unconscious … Yes, I'm very interested in clarifying certain things for myself and achieving certain stylistic [aesthetic] goals, but the book has to be read too; if not, it lacks a certain sexiness. Writing is a dialogue with another person. On the other hand, I go alone to see a movie: that's an act in which the other person is for me the movie.66

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