Kiss of the Spider Woman Essay - Critical Essays

Critical Evaluation

Made into a stage play, a Hollywood feature film, and a very successful Broadway musical, this novel is Manuel Puig’s most famous. Some say that it is also his most accomplished, using all his characteristic techniques in a way that remains accessible to the ordinary reader and coupling them with themes that are the closest to the author’s heart.

Puig was born in rural Argentina in 1932 and attended the University of Buenos Aires and film school. In 1956, he moved to London and then Rome, where he worked as an assistant film director. He returned to Buenos Aires and worked as a director for a year but then moved to New York, where he took up permanent residence. His novels reflect his early life in the rural countryside, where he spent most of his time watching films made during the 1930’s and 1940’s. His experience with the simple people with whom he matured shaped the sorts of characters he includes in his novels. His studies and his travels, however, prepared him for the sophisticated techniques and daring themes that make his writing stand out in contemporary literature.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is a story without a narrator, and much of it reads like a movie script without definite indications of who is speaking. The variety of types of discourse is part of Puig’s charm as a writer, and Kiss of the Spider Woman includes dream sequences, remembrances of film clips, official police reports, snatches of letters, interviews, and, most strangely, interminable footnotes. The effect is to force the reader to become involved in the act of creation, as if Molina is there recounting a story for the reader to visualize. In reading the novel, one is actually having an experience similar to that of the characters; one is lifted out of the chair and taken to many imaginary places. Using such...

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