Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Books: instinct, intellect, and obsession

Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman, by Suzanne Jill Levine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

Nobody knows Manuel Puig like Suzanne Jill Levine. Puig's principal English translator, Levine was also Puig's personal friend. Her firsthand knowledge of his work and of the writer himself are extraordinary, and she has supplemented it with abundant research, including interviews with his relatives, friends, and associates. Best of all, Levine is herself an engaging storyteller, and this lively, information-packed biography reads like a novel. Manuel; his mother, Male; and a host of writers, actors, and lovers practically jump off the page. Delicious details abound, and even her description of Puig's death is somehow dazzling, theatrical, and slightly over the top. Manuel would have loved it.

The unifying theme is the Spider Woman, embodiment of the magical power of film to seduce and entrap. However, Levine's book deals with all of Puig's writing, not just Kiss of the Spider Woman, his best known and most successful novel. Most particularly, it focuses on Puig's obsessive passion for Hollywood, and how it informed every aspect of his life and work. "More than simply loving the movies, he wanted to live in them; he would have liked to be a diva like Norma Shearer, but more than that, he wanted to be the character she played," writes Levine.

The biographer traces Puig's life from the town of General Villegas on the Argentine pampas, where he fell in love with movies (the only refuge from the tedium of everyday existence), through his days at the Cinecitta in Rome, the genesis of his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, and his struggle to get it published, negative reactions to his books in Argentina, and finally his exile to New York, then Rio, then Cuernavaca. The broad outlines of Puig's life are already familiar to most of his fans, but Levine fleshes out the story with fascinating minutiae on his quirks (including his tightfistedness and his obsession with hygiene), as well as revealing information on his artistic and personal struggles. One of the main issues, of course, is Puig's homosexuality and the reluctance of mainstream publishers to take on books dealing with thorny subjects. Levine, who obviously feels enormous affection for Puig, deals with this topic with frankness and delicacy.

Puig didn't become a household name until the extraordinary and unexpected success of the...