PUIG, MANUEL

born Dec. 28, 1932, General Villegas, Arg. died July 22, 1990, Cuernavaca, Mex. Argentine novelist and motion-picture scriptwriter who achieved international acclaim with his novel El beso de la mujer araa (1976; Kiss of the Spider Woman). Puig learned English as a child by seeing every American film he could. He went to Rome in 1957 to study film directing and resided for a time in Stockholm and London. When Puig returned to Buenos Aires his film scripts were not well received, and he decided that the cinema was not to be his only career. His first novel, La traicin de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), is a semiautobiographical account of a boy who escapes the boredom of living on the Pampas by fantasizing about the lives of the stars he has seen in motion pictures. Puig used shifting points of view, flashbacks, and interior monologue to portray the frustration and alienation of his characters, whose only escape is offered by the vacuous world of films and pop art. The style of his second novel, Boquitas pintadas (1969; Painted Little Mouths; Eng. trans. Heartbreak Tango), parodied the serialized novels that are popular in Argentina. The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) is a detective novel describing the psychopathic behaviour of characters who are sexually repressed. Kiss of the Spider Woman is a novel told in dialogues between a middle-aged homosexual and a younger revolutionary who are detained in the same jail cell. The book's denunciation of sexual and political repression, treated poetically and with an uncommon degree of tenderness, contributed to its success. His later books included Pubis angelical (1979; Angelic Pubis) and Maldicin eterna a quien lea estas pginas (1980; Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages). The major novels were translated into more than a dozen languages, and several of his film scripts won awards.