Remembering the Great Manuel Puig, Cosmopolitan Chronicler of the Everyday

Puig is a common surname in Spanish, with a Catalan etymology that means “hill” and was pronounced as “pweeg” not as “puch” because, as South Americans, his family used Castilian rather than Catalan pronunciation. The novelist Manuel Puig is remembered today, by people over 40 or 50, mainly because of the Oscar-winning movie and the Broadway musical hit based on his fourth novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Born in 1932 in a small town on the Argentine pampas, Manuel found his salvation in writing. Growing up as a homosexual in a Catholic country, he had to live a double life, even with his family. 

By the time I met Manuel, he was an up-and-coming star (or “starlet” as he always preferred the feminine). La Traición de Rita Hayworth, his first novel to be published in Spanish, had won a major prize in Spain, and his second novel Boquitas pintadas was a bestseller in South America. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth began as a failed screenplay—Manuel’s driving ambition since childhood had been to make movies—and became his autobiographical first novel. It was not only radically unconventional in its form, in which only the characters speak and there is apparently no author, but also in its content, strongly focused on women, a subversive approach within a patriarchal culture of machismo.

With his camp sensibility [Puig] pinpoints so accurately the kitsch euphemisms, the everyday language of evasion.

The characters are mostly children, adolescents, and women, and the reader is guided only by what appears to be their unexpurgated monologues or dialogues in which the speakers are not identified. There are also diaries, a written assignment for school, and a letter, and the main character is Toto (thinly disguising Puig’s own childhood nickname, Coco), a lonely boy who becomes a keen voyeur of the adult world, so that he is not only one of the speakers but also, like the reader, a listener. 

As a translator, I was swept away by Puig’s perfectly nuanced, almost uncanny imitations of Argentine voices, distinct according to age, gender or class. As I began to translate this novel it was both exciting and difficult to undertake this creative challenge, to bring into English the living spoken language of the original, to reproduce their natural voice, the way they speak. With his camp sensibility he pinpoints so accurately the kitsch euphemisms, the everyday language of evasion. His books are subtle works of art using campy comically unsubtle materials, accessible yet sophisticated; they had popular appeal but were also high art. 

In his many interviews, Manuel explained the role of movies in his childhood, telling us that “Mama would take me to the movies in the afternoons to entertain me and herself, and I decided that reality was what was on the screen and that my fate was to live lost in the middle of the pampas in a bad impromptu Western.” The movies that were “reality” to him were Hollywood dreams in the form of melodramas and comedies. His childhood at the movies was an escape from a dreary and limited everyday life in a small rural town. 

In Washington Heights, the New York neighborhood where I grew up in the 1950s and early 60s, when my mother and father took me with them to the movies on Saturday nights as they couldn’t afford a babysitter, this excursion was the biggest treat of the week, as it was for Toto in Manuel’s novel. My parents seemed oblivious to the impact the more “mature” films might have on a child; I was around twelve (when foreign films were still rare if not taboo) when they took me to And God Created Woman. This French film featured the sexiest woman in the world at that time, Brigitte Bardot, who appears in the nude and whose husband might be impotent. Whether or not I was aware of what impotence meant, the film pulsated with perverse eroticism and I felt curious about it but, needless to say, nobody explained anything.

In the monologue of five-year-old Toto in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Manuel shows how his young avatar was disturbed by a supposedly educational film shown at school about the sea world. As an innocent spectator he thinks the underwater images are “hairy” plants that look like what he seems to consider threatening vaginas swallowing little fish; he associates the hairy image with a sex act he spies on between a boy and a girl, a scene I translated as, “…the boy’s hairs start eating her behind…and little by little eats her all up.” Sex looks very scary from this perspective for the young child.

He felt isolated in his home country not only because of its hostility to homosexuals, but because it was so far from Gotham and Paris.

Through his first novel, Manuel already seemed to be inviting the reader to understand his homosexuality, or to have, at least, compassion for his plight. I could relate this invitation to my own need to understand and to accept my problematic relationships, with older men and then with gay men, and my association of the erotic with perversion or taboos. I had much older siblings, and in a way, I grew up as an “only” child, on the sidelines of the life of older parents, just as Toto saw movies through his mother’s eyes. By sharing intensely his mother’s excursions to the movie and that for her, going to the movies was a wondrous escape, the happiest moment of her day, for him the world and the movies became one, and he preferred the movies, a better version of reality. The movies for millions of people during hard times were a way to escape, to liberate themselves from conscious worries, or to will oneself into a better life. Such was the case of my parents, a perspective that I adopted, like Toto, before I was aware that it was a point of view rather than a fact.

When I met him in 1969, Manuel was stopping on his way from Paris to Buenos Aires. Manuel was an incessant traveler, not unusual for an Argentine and, in those days, for a gay man. Argentina, at the bottom of South America, is a country way off course, and populated mostly with the children of Europeans for whom traveling is like breathing, who miss the world, the centers of culture, so very far way. Manuel always claimed to be seeking true love, and I do believe he was. Mexico and New York would be home in exile from fascist Argentina until he moved to Brazil in 1980, however, he constantly traveled in pursuit of his profession and, as he said, true love, often at bookfairs, where he would meet with publishers and translators. Like most Argentines who had the means to travel, he felt isolated in his home country not only because of its hostility to homosexuals, but because it was so far from Gotham and Paris, or 42nd Street and the Moulin Rouge, that is, civilization. 

He was good-looking, like an Italian version of Tyrone Power, my partner Emir had told me, and so when I saw a slight, dark-haired fellow who vaguely fit this La Dolce Vita description briskly enter the revolving door of the Chinese restaurant in Greenwich Village that cold night in December, I knew it had to be Puig. His neck wrapped in a scarf up to his nose, and wearing a leather jacket, he quickly sighted Emir and came over to our booth.

I could tell from Manuel’s big mischievous eyes with long thick eyelashes, that he was surprised upon meeting me, perhaps slightly shocked by the age gap, having known his distinguished friend Emir (who looked his years at forty-eight) as the husband of an elegant Uruguayan society woman his own age, and here he was with this American girl with straight brown hair and bangs, who looked so young. Manuel took in this contrast with one writerly glance as the two of them chatted eagerly, catching up, not having seen each other for quite some time, with a lot of water under the bridge for them both. I chimed in now and again, especially when the subject was movies.

Manuel—for whom the last great Hollywood film was Sunset Boulevard, made in 1950—found the “new realism” of contemporary films to be limited and limiting. Hence, he nicknamed four “new Hollywood” (i.e. real rather than glamorous) 1970s women stars (among them the admirable Ellen Burstyn) the “Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse.” This was not a compliment.

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From Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir by Suzanne Jill Levine. Copyright © 2025. Available from Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.