"I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side." -- Manuel Puig
Manuel Puig (born Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne) (General Villegas, Argentina, December 28, 1932 - Cuernavaca, Mexico, 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) (Little Painted Lips), 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.
"All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.""As a rule, one should never place form over content.""Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.""Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.""For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.""Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.""I allow my intuition to lead my path.""I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.""I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.""I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.""I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.""I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.""I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.""I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.""I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.""I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.""I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.""I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.""I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.""I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.""I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.""I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.""I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.""I only understand realism.""I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.""I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.""I would very much like to become a best-selling author.""I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.""I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.""I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.""I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.""I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.""I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.""If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.""If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.""If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.""In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?""In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.""Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.""It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.""It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.""It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.""Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.""Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.""Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing.""My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.""My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.""My pleasure was to copy, not to create.""My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.""One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.""Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.""Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.""The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.""The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!""The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.""We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.""What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?""What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.""Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.""Writers are not meant for action."
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 4:55 a.m. on July 22, 1990.
The 2004 movie 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.
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".
Some of his work has recently been translated to English and published by Dalkey Archive Press:
