Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas - Manuel Puig

I don’t know about eternal damnation, but terminal boredom is certainly a possibility for anyone reading these pages. Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas is written entirely as a series of dialogues between two men – and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a method often used by Puig, extensively and effectively in Kiss of the Spiderwoman, and like that novel there is an intriguing relationship that develops between two men of different walks of life.

In Maldición eterna, an old man in exile from political persecution in Argentina, Ramirez, recuperating in a New York hospital with shattered memories of the past, encounters and forms a friendship with a New York carriage driver, Larry, who has been hired to show him around the city. Although a driver, Larry is an educated man, but he also keeps his troubled past hidden or wrapped in a web of falsification. After the initial set-up however, the novel’s dialogues become rather baffling, some of them hallucinated by the sick old man doubtless on medication, others again just guessing or inventing the men’s past histories. Their exchanges also explore the surrogate father/son relationship that develops between the men, and their relationships with women, particularly one of the nurses at the hospital.

Exploring reality and invention (again like the old movies that mirror the lives of the characters in El Beso de la Mujer Araña), this should be intriguing, but it’s not. Puig’s final novel Cae La Noche Tropical also employs a strict dialogue and letter format between two old ladies who are sisters to establish connections, lines of communication to the past, to old desires and new regrets, and in spite of its flaws and some tedious passages, he uses it there much better and to a more meaningful purpose in that novel. Here it’s desperately dull, over-laboured and just hard to read.