"Reality . . . Isn't Restricted by This Cell We Live In"

books:

	• Kiss of the Spider Woman Manuel Puig Vintage, 1991 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

kiss of the spider woman

a good read if you're interested on how to use dialogue to convey action/emotion

"Reality . . . Isn't Restricted by This Cell We Live In"

This was Puig's fourth and best-known novel. It was published in 1976 and translated into English three years later.

Much of the book consisted of dialogue. It, and the shifting from the daily routine of the two main characters in prison to the descriptions of the films, was usually entertaining and kept my interest. The author contrasted the two personalities and their ways of thinking -- political and sensual, engaged and escapist, living for the future and living for the present, "masculine" and "feminine." He showed the two men opposed at first, but moving to accommodate each other as the book progressed. For me, this was shown especially well at the end.

The range of films described was also interesting. Obviously, one can relate the characters in the films -- with their double lives, terrible secrets, covert missions, the search for love and the need to believe in it, love overcoming betrayal and hardship -- to the two in prison.

The amount of space in the book given to films, and later on to the popular songs in the last film, was part of Puig's usual concern, how people use those forms to escape from reality but also elevate their lives, how their understanding of themselves is guided by the forms, with their "tremendous truths."

Toward the book's end, the characters either began speaking the language of the other or acting something like the other. The author also seemed to suggest that an ideal relationship, whatever the members' gender, was one where people kept no secrets from each other. All these things were enjoyable.

A few lengthy interior monologues in the novel weren't understood, and the over-long footnotes on Freud, Reich, Marcuse, Brown and others, or the description of wartime Berlin, often seemed dated and over the top. Much in them concerned the theorists' calls for a new morality and revision of the idea of human nature. Several set up the idea of "perversions" as threats to the "basic repressive principles fundamental to the organization of capitalism." And discussed the need for men to liberate the women locked in the dungeons of their psyche and restructure their views of sexual normality. These footnotes suggested that one of the men, Molina, might be a revolutionary element in his own way.

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An unlikely friendship, and some plot twists...

"Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1976) is a novel written by Manuel Puig (1932-1990), an Argentinian playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Its subject is controversial, as it delves upon themes such as sexual identity, violence and torture. All the same, I think reading it is worthwhile, as it is one of those books that tell a story that comes alive to the reader...

In case you haven't heard about "Kiss of the Spider Woman", I will tell you a little about its plot. The main characters are Valentin and Molina, two men that share a prison cell, during the Argentinian dictatorship of the late 1970's. Molina is a sensitive soul that happens to be an homosexual, and Valentin a revolutionary that despises the fact that Molina has no political ideas (and is confused by the notion that someone can choose to be gay). Due to the fact that both share the same cell, Valentin and Molina spend some time talking to each other about their ideas and feelings, something they wouldn't have done in any other circumstance. Despite their differences, an unlikely friendship will begin between them, a friendship that may well turn into something more. However, there is more than one twist that will surprise you in this story, even though I won't tell you about that in order not to spoil the surprise.

On the whole, this is an engaging book that is likely to interest the reader, but that is not adequate for children, and that won't appeal to those that don't want to read a book that deals with homosexuality. I liked the way in which Puig told Valentin and Molina's story, and that is the reason why I give it 3.5 stars...

Belen Alcat

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Very visual gay "Thousand and One Nights"

Having watched the 1985 film starring William Hurt as Molina and Raul Julia as Valentin, I always intended to read the novel itself. Since this is the first Puig novel I've read I was astounded at how incredibly visual it is. The descriptions of faces, dresses, furniture, buildings and landscapes are so rich as to be almost unbearable. It did me make feel as if though I were partly blind, missing all these features that a writer like Puig conveys so well.

The story first: Molina (a gay middle aged child molester) and Valentin (a middle class young revolutionary) share a cell in an Argentinian prison during the dictatorship around 1975. Valentin is a rational man who uses his captivity to improve himself through reading, whereas Molina is a phantasist, who seeks to evade his squalid surroundings by elaborate rememorations of movies. Eventually, Molina narrates the movies to Valentin, usually cutting off at key suspense points because of bedtime. The movies are of the B- sort, but very appealing. They include 1940s horror/suspense, a Nazi propaganda musical so over the top that it is almost pornographic and probably far more effective qua propaganda than the actual movies of the period, musical drama/fantasy, a "tele-novela" (soap opera)-type Latin story about upper class revolutionaries, blacksploitation voodoo in some unidentified Caribbean island and a Mexican 1940s musical around a particularly appealing genre (the bolero). Initially Valentin tries to analyze the movies through rationalist (Marxist and Freudian) lenses, but eventually he surrenders to fantasy and allows himself to enjoy them as love stories, which they all are. Both Molina and Valentin are quite sparse about their own stories, but we find that Molina is a mamma's boy who can only play a passive sexual role, and that Valentin is an educated, upper-middle class man who, in spite of political correctness, prefers women of a similar background rather than committed revolutionaries.

Just below this level of story-telling, there is a darker, more realistic one: Molina has been promised an amnesty if he gets useful information from Valentin about his subversive group. He is a stool-pigeon. And the prison warden is slowly poisoning Valenti?n's food, so that he will have to take prescription drugs that will make it easier to break his will and get him to confess. However, Molina seems to fall in love with Valentin and eventually stops cooperating with the authorities. Valentin incurs in some lirical but remarkably shocking (to this reader) sex with Molina, who agrees to cooperate with Valentin's subversive group in spite of his lack of political ideas. Molina is released and is eventually killed when he attempts to liaise with Valentin's people. Valentin is tortured and physically broken in prison, but he manages to avoid giving his comrades away by taking refuge in fantasy, as Molina taught him.

How does the book compare to the movie? William Hurt is perfect as Molina, whereas Raul Julia overplays the "macho" side of the Valentin character, and makes him sound less educated and of a lower class than he is in the book. The visuals conjured by Molina's storytelling may not be reproduced in an actual movie, and they are as rich as anything by Lezama Lima or Cabrera Infante, Cuban writers to whom Puig is indebted. The book is full of cinematic references beyond the obvious ones. Molina and Valentin are like a latter-day Laurel and Hardy, or like Sancho and Don Quixotte. Molina is emotion, intuition and feeling, whereas Valentin is reason and logic. They are like a divided self, that can only be complete when both sides are joined. This union destroys Molina but strengthen's Valentin. Molina seduces Valentin both sexually and emotionally, but Valentin turns Molina into an instrument of his political will.

A peculiarity of the book is its extensive footnotes concerning the origin and true nature of homosexuality, a veritable romp through Freudianism and its offshoots, including revolutionary sexual politics so dated that it brought a smile to this reader's face. I can't imagine why they are relevant to this book, but I enjoyed them and learned a few things.

Overall this is an enjoyable, well-written book, but I didn't especially enjoy the sexual parts, although I'll grant that they were relevant to the story and as tastefully written as it can be managed given the characters' circumstances.

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for the footnotes

Since there are already so many reviews for this excellent book, I will limit my contribution to a few comments on the footnotes. They are not mere postmodern flourish, nor are they superfluous. They function in several ways. First, they mark a certain reception of psychoanalytic theory in Argentina. Secondly, although in the beginning they correspond to the story (in the tradition way that footnotes do -- as elaboration on a point that cannot be contained in the narrative) they begin to loose their direct correspondence as the story continues. This "unraveling" corresponds to the unraveling of the framing device (most importantly the telling of stories), which traditionally is a narrative structure that functions to hold sexual desire at bay. In other words, the footnotes lose their hold as the characters become closer, sharing more personal facets of their lives, and eventually becoming sexual. In this way the footnotes subtend the narrative in such a way as to track sexual desire and the confusing and contradictory aspects (and theories) that attend to it. I think it is essential to read the footnotes along with the narrative since they add to Puig's experimental narrative style. If they are confusing, that is the point. Unexpected desire, like love, always is.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Sometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause which makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love which makes all else endurable. Each has always been alone, and always - especially now - in danger of betrayal. But in cell, each surrenders to the other something of himself that he has never surrendered before.

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