Kiss of the Spider Woman (novel)

Puig started Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1974 starting with Molina, who was an experiment in imagining a romantic female. From there the rest of the notes sprouted into the novel.[3] At first the only country that would publish the novel was Spain.[4] Upon publication it was included on a list of novels that could not be consumed by the population of Buenos Aires, along with novels such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa.[5] Puig feared the publication of the novel would affect his family negatively. Despite this it was entered in the Frankfurt Book Fair.[6] It remained banned until 1983 when the Raúl Alfonsín government took control.[7] The English translation of the book was started even before its official publication in Spanish in 1976.[8] Some of the translation proved problematic for Puig including Molina's speech which he could not get to portray the proper sentimental aspects of the voice.[9] The English translation appeared in 1979.[10] The French translation also proved problematic as the publisher edited out some scenes for their explicit nature.[11] In 1981, Kiss of the Spider Woman won the best Latin American novel of the year from Istituto Italo Latino Americano in Italy.[12]

Two prisoners, Luis Molina and Valentín Arregui, share a cell in a Buenos Aires prison. The story takes place between September 9, 1975 and October 8, 1975.[13] Molina, a transgender woman, is in jail for "corruption of a minor", while Valentín is a political prisoner who is part of a revolutionary group trying to overthrow the government. The two characters, seemingly opposites in every way, form an intimate bond in their cell, and their relationship changes both of them in profound ways. Molina recounts various films she has seen to Valentín in order to help them forget their situation.

Toward the middle of the novel the reader finds out that Molina is actually a spy planted in Valentín's cell to befriend him and try to extract information about his organization. Molina gets provisions from the outside for her cooperation with the officials in the hopes of keeping up appearances that her mother comes to visit her (thus giving her a reason to leave the cell when she reports to the warden). It is through her general acts of kindness to Valentín that the two fall into a romance and become lovers, albeit briefly. For her cooperation, Molina is paroled. On the day she leaves, Valentín asks Molina to take a message to his revolutionary group on the outside. Little does she know that she is also being followed by secret police trying to find the location of the group.

Molina dies after being shot by Valentín's group at the rendezvous point after the secret police disrupt the assignation. The novel ends in Valentín's consciousness, after he has been given an anesthetic following torture, in which he imagines himself sailing away with his beloved Marta.

• Molina – One of the protagonists and the prime storyteller. Trans woman who has been jailed for "corrupting a minor".
• Valentín – The other protagonist, and the main implied listener. He is a revolutionary, imprisoned for belonging to a leftist organization that is trying to overthrow the government.
• The Warden – One of the antagonists in the novel; he sets up Molina to spy and retrieve information from Valentín, and receives regular reports from him.
• Gabriel – The waiter whom Molina befriends; he acts as Molina's main love interest throughout the novel.
• Marta – Marta is Valentín's love interest, whom he lost in order to maintain a serious commitment to his revolutionary organization. She only appears in memories and streams-of-consciousness in the novel.
• The prison guard
• Molina's mother

The novel received mixed reviews. The Hudson Review stated that "Puig is a master of narrative craftsmanship" (1979),[16] while The New York Times Book Review asserted that "Other than these film synopses, there's not much here".[17] Rita Felski, in The Uses of Literature, has argued for an interpretation of Kiss of the Spider Woman as "an exercise in aesthetic re-education," a reading that is indicative of the principles she has laid out in her vision of postcritique.[18]

The author includes a long series of footnotes on the psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality. The footnotes act largely as a representation of Puig's political intention in writing the novel: to present an objective view of homosexuality.[19] The footnotes include both factual information and that given by the fictional Anelli Taub.[20] The footnotes tend to appear at moments of misunderstanding between Molina and Valentín.[21] The extended notes deepen the novel's experimental nature while clarifying the book's challenge to traditional psychoanalytic views of homosexuality. However, the two levels, the literary one of the dialogue and the one of the footnotes, proceed hand in hand, aiming at the same goal, an objective that the author deliberately leaves open to the interpretation of the reader.[22]

Other themes include political psychology, film, love, and communism.

• Levine, Suzanne Jill. Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2000. Print.
• Tittler, Jonathan. Manuel Puig. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1993. Print.
• Kerr, Lucille. Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Print.