“I wanted to work with an unsophisticated type, a reactionary in a way – the type of homosexual who rejects all experimentation, all new trends. Molina is, in Puig’s own words, an old-fashioned homosexual:
Valentin is presented as a serious person devoted to the cause of revolution Molina as weaker and more trivial. “If I’m not busy reading and I’m still keeping quiet, it’s just because I’m thinking. It’s well known that Puig was influenced by cinema as much as literature, and the novel begins with Molina telling Valentin the story of the film Cat People to pass the time, at least in the evening – during the day, Valentin tells him: This has the interesting effect of both emphasising their separation and togetherness their difference and their need for each other.
The novel mainly consists of the dialogue between the two men – although there are moments when italics are used to show us Molina’s thoughts, and, later, Molina’s dialogue with the prison Warden and some police reports, there is no other narrative. One, Valentin, is a political prisoner the other, Molina, is gay, charged with “corruption of minors”. The novel is set almost entirely in a prison cell containing two very different inmates. Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman (translated by Thomas Colchie in 1979) remains his most famous work (it certainly seems to be the only one of his novels still in print in the UK).
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