El beso de la mujer araña by Manuel Puig

The English translation appeared in 1979.

Some of the translation proved problematic for Puig including Molina's speech which he could not get to portray the proper sentimental aspects of the voice. The English translation of the book was started even before its official publication in Spanish in 1976. It remained banned until 1983 when the Raúl Alfonsín government took control. Despite this it was entered in the Frankfurt Book Fair. Puig feared the publication of the novel would affect his family negatively. Upon publication it was included on a list of novels that could not be consumed by the population of Buenos Aires, along with novels such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa. Īt first the only country that would publish the novel was Spain.

From there the rest of the notes sprouted into the novel. Puig started Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1974 starting with Molina, who was an experiment in imagining a romantic female. It was also made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1985, a Broadway musical in 1993 and a 2020 television special episode of Katy Keene. Puig adapted the novel into a stage play in 1983, with an English translation by Allan Baker. Thus there are a main plot, several subplots, and five additional stories that comprise the novel. The conversations between the characters, when not focused on the moment at hand, are recountings of films that Molina has seen, which act as a form of escape from their environment. What is not written as dialogue or stream-of-consciousness is written as meta-fictional government documentation. There are also significant portions of stream-of-consciousness writing. It is written in large part as dialogue, without any indication of who is speaking, except for a dash (-) to show a change of speaker. The novel's form is unusual in that there is no traditional narrative voice. It is generally considered Puig's most successful work. It depicts the daily conversations between two cellmates in an Argentine prison, Molina and Valentín, and the intimate bond they form in the process. Kiss of the Spider Woman ( Spanish: El beso de la mujer araña) is a 1976 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig.

El beso de la mujer araña by Manuel Puig