”ki Of The Spiderwoman”
”Kiss of the Spiderwoman”
“Kiss of Spiderwoman” is one of the brightest novels, written by Manuel Puig, an Argentinean author. In order to understand author’s main ideas and his message, some facts about Puig’s life have to be mentioned.
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 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, “Traicion de Rita Hayworth”. Because he had leftist political tendencies, he also foresaw a rightist wave in Argentina, so 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. In Latin American literary histories, he is presented as a writer who belongs to Post-modernist school. Puig lived in exile throughout most of his life. In 1989 he moved from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he died in 1990. Among his best known novels are “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth”, “Heartbreak Tango”, and “Kiss of the Spiderwoman”, which was made into a film and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.
“Kiss of the Spiderwoman” tells the story of two prisoners: Molina and Valentín, and their relationships in prison. Molina, an effeminate and openly homosexual window-dresser, is in jail for "corruption of a minor," while Valentín is a political prisoner who is part of a revolutionary group trying to bring down the...
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