Book 35: Argentina (Spanish) – El beso de la mujer araña = The Kiss of the Spider Woman (Manuel PUIG)

In her we see that she has something outré about her, that she’s a woman like no other. She seems very young, hardly more than twenty-five, the petite face a little catlike, the nose small and pert, the form of her face is… round rather than oval, the forehead wide, the cheeks large too but then falling to a point, like those of a cat.
[my translation]

 

This one was due to a late change in plans. I was going to write about Borges’ amazing Ficciones which is a collection of fantastic, deep and intricate short stories, but now I’ve decided to see if I can find a novel from every country to read. (I was also accepting short stories and epics, so I’ll have to choose a couple of new titles for some countries I’ve already read to catch up).
While this is certainly a novel, in a way you could consider Puig’s book as a series of short stories, linked by a framing narrative as in the Thousand Nights and One Night for example, although the frame is much more prominent here. (Only one and a bit of these stories made it into the great movie of this novel -filmed for some reason in Brazil, though the book is set in Buenos Aires – the first one, a story of a Nazi romance, along with a short appearance by the Spider Woman herself. As far as we are concerned, the Spider Woman is the gay man Molina, and he intoxicatingly relates the stories, in the manner of film synopses, to his cellmate, Valentín. For we are in prison, although it takes a while for us to realise this (unlike in the movie, where the bars are the first thing we see); Molina is in for “corruption of minors”, Valentín is a political prisoner. Each of them is a cosmic mistake: one a woman in a man’s body, the other a martyr who doesn’t want to be a hero. Each of them in fact, with differing degrees of willingness and success, attempts in turn to entrap the other. Molina, who has been apolitical until now, surprisingly turns out to be the stronger of the two.
When one of the pair is released, the authorities’ notes on the minutiae of his actions, as detailed as those of an entomologist studying a spider, are chilling.
One thing I found a little strange is the extensive Burton-like footnotes about the theoretical and psychological aspects of homosexuality, which go on for pages and were presumably placed by the author. Somehow they don’t seem necessary or appropriate in a novel.
Kiss of the Spider woman is a tour de force of storytelling and dialogue, powerful and thought-provoking.

 

PUIG, Manuel (1932 – 1990), El beso de la mujer araña, Barcelona, Biblioteca de Bolsillo, 1994 (first published 1976), ISBN 884-322-3026-X