Goodbye to Manuel Puig: unfinished business.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Argentine author - Obituary

A letter from Manuel Puig lies on my desk, unanswered. I meant to write to him, of course. It was just one of those things I didn't quite get around to doing. All I needed was a day or two more, but before I found time, Argentine author Manuel Puig had died in Mexico, at age 58, of complications from an operation.

To me, that letter symbolizes all the business that was left unfinished by Puig's untimely death. One of the most energetic, promising novelists and playwrights of the post-boom generation, Puig was in the midst of several projects when he died. One was a production of his play El misterio del ramo de rosas (The Mystery of the Bouquet of Roses), planned for next April in Spain. Another was a novel, which he had already outlined, that would have taken place in a town in the Pampa during the 40s. Although Puig said that he would not be the protagonist of his new book, he himself was born in the town of General Villegas, in the Province of Buenos Aires, and spent his early years on the Pampa. In the work he was projecting, he intended to explore the repression inflicted by society on the individual and also the constraints the individual places on himself.

Puig's first love was film, and as a young man he studied directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. According to him, he was too timid and unsure of himself to give orders, and soon turned to writing. His first novel, La traicion de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), published in 1968, was a largely autobiographical account of growing up in a small town on the Pampa, where the only diversion was the movies. In this book Puig explores the pressures on a young boy who is too sensitive and unathletic to fit into the macho mold imposed by his father and other men. His next novel, Boquitas pintadas (Heartbreak Tango) (1969), on which a film was based, is a kind of detective story inspired by the newspaper serials that were once popular in Latin America and elsewhere. Like Puig's first novel, Boquitas pintadas exposes the boredom, pettiness, and hypocrisy of small-town life and examines the influence of popular culture--movies, magazines, tangos--on the people. Perhaps his best-known novel is El beso de la mujer...