Manuel Puig

Puig was born in General Villegas, Buenos Aires Province. Since there was no high school in General Villegas, his parents sent him to Buenos Aires in 1946. Puig attended Colegio Ward in Villa Sarmiento (Morón County). This is when he began to read systematically, beginning with a collection of texts by Nobel Prize winners. A classmate named Horacio, in whose home Puig rented accommodation when he first moved to Buenos Aires introduced him to readings from the school of psychoanalysis. The first novel that he read was The Pastoral Symphony by André Gide; he also read Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Thomas Mann.

Horacio also introduced Puig to European cinema. After seeing Quai des Orfèvres (1947), he decided that he wanted to be a film director.[1] To prepare for his chosen career, he learned Italian, French, and German, which were considered "the new languages of cinema". He was advised to study engineering in order to specialize in sound-on-film but did not consider this to be the right choice. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Architecture but only took classes for six months. In 1951, Puig switched to the School of Philosophy. He was a diligent student, although he struggled with subjects such as Latin. When he graduated, he was already working in film 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. However, the world of Hollywood and the stars that had captivated him during his childhood now disappointed him; the exceptions were Marilyn Monroe and Gloria Swanson.

A note in the magazine Radiolandia about the upcoming premiere of the film Deshonra prompted Puig to try and meet its director Daniel Tinayre, whose comedy La vendedora de fantasías he admired. Since the director denied him access to the set, he spoke to the actress Fanny Navarro, who played the main role, without Tinayre's permission. He felt no sympathy for her since she supported Juan Domingo Perón, who had prohibited the importation of American films into Argentina. Navarro sent him to another actress of the cast, Herminia Franco, who got him in. Shortly after, he began to work in Alex laboratories.

In 1953, Puig did his obligatory military service in the area of Aeronautics, working as a translator.

In the 1960s, Manuel Puig 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 previous months, he had stopped smoking on his doctor's orders and took daily walks but did not feel well at the altitude of Mexico. He also made sure to receive his care in a clinic near his house so he would not be far away from his mother, but for economic reasons and availability of contacts, he had access to higher quality medical attention. 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 what needed to be done.

On Saturday July 21, 1990, he was checked into Las Palmas Surgical Center for risk of peritonitis. An emergency procedure was performed on his inflamed gallbladder, which was removed. While Puig was recovering after the surgery, he began to have respiratory problems; his lungs had filled with fluid, and he was becoming delirious. The medical team was unable to help Puig and they had to secure him to the bed. He died from acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) at 4:55 a.m. on July 22, 1990.[2]

His death leaked quickly through the media. Although he had a background of cardiac problems, the first public assumption was that he had died from AIDS. It was soon ascertained that Manuel Puig was not a carrier of HIV. Nevertheless, the public had already contested that fact several times.

Only six people attended his funeral service, including his mother, his friends Javier Labrada and Agustín Garcia Gil, and his colleague Tununa Mercado who happened to be on his way to Xalapa city in Veracruz.

When Jorge Abelardo Ramos, the Argentine ambassador of Mexico was asked to speak to the media about the death of Manuel Puig, he responded by saying that he was not aware of the death of an Argentine with that name. Regardless, they had his body sent to the Federal District of Mexico for his funeral rites with the Writer's Society, and the ambassador arrived and gave a speech.

Manuel Puig's bodily remains were sent to Argentina a few days later and were placed in the Puig family tomb in the cemetery of La Plata.

The 2004 film Vereda Tropical, directed by Javier Torres, depicts the period during which Puig lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The writer's role is played by the actor Fabio Aste.

Critics such as Pamela Bacarisse divide Puig's work into two groups: 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".[3]

Three translations of his work have been reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press:

• 2009: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth
• 2010: The Buenos Aires Affair
• 2010: Heartbreak Tango

• List of Argentine writers
• List of LGBT writers
• List of playwrights
• Latin American Literature

Sources

• Bacarisse, Pamela (1988). The Necessary Dream: A Study of the Novels of Manuel Puig. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-7083-1011-3.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Levine, Suzanne Jill (2000). Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions. New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-28190-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Vivancos Pérez, Ricardo F. "Una lectura queer de Manuel Puig: Blood and Sand en La traición de Rita Hayworth". Revista Iberoamericana. Vol. LXXII, Nos. 215-6 (2006): 633–50.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Manuel Puig.

• Wheaton, Kathleen (1989). "Manuel Puig, The Art of Fiction No. 114". The Paris Review (Winter II).CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• A Conversation with Manuel Puig (Interview took place during a weekend in September 1979, after Puig was part of a Congress of Hispanic-American Writers in Medellin, Colombia.)
• Manuel Puig at Find a Grave
• Manuel Puig: Una aproximación biográfica. Eine Multimedia-Biographie auf CD-ROM. Buenos Aires 2008. ISBN 978-987-05-4332-9
• Manuel Puig Corral recorded at the Library of Congress for the Hispanic Division’s audio literary archive on March 25, 1977