It is in some ways the opposite of Ariel Dorfman’s “ Death and the Maiden,” a play in which the psychic scars of the Pinochet regime in Chile prove a universal solvent, dissolving any attempt at decency, or humanity, or truth. When I was nineteen, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” struck me as a work about finding love and preserving one’s humanity in the most inhumane of places. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former. Within a few pages, I realized my mistake. The film and musical so overshadowed their source material that, when I first encountered the book, in a course called Subjectivity in Literature my freshman year of college, I thought that my eccentric professor had assigned a novelization to us as a way of challenging our assumptions about which books were worthy of study. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the only book of Puig’s in English that remains steadily in print-his first novel, “ Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” was recently issued for the second time this century by McNally Editions-and the cover of the Vintage International paperback boasts the same typeface and image as the playbill of the Broadway production. Yet for all his frustration with the adaptations of his novel, they guaranteed its longevity. Puig disliked the film, and, shortly after a disastrous workshop of the musical at SUNY Purchase, died from a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven.
A play adaptation, co-authored by Puig, became an international success, and led to an Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt and Raul Julia as well as a hit musical written by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally. Yet “Kiss of the Spider Woman” had a remarkable afterlife. Originally released to critical dismissal-Robert Coover called it “a rather frail little love story” in the Times-the book landed with a thud, managing to make Puig a celebrity in the gay enclave of New York City’s Christopher Street, but not much else. Vicki Baum, the author of “ Grand Hotel,” once wrote that “you can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success.” After witnessing the fall and rise of his novel “ Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Manuel Puig likely would’ve agreed with her.
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