PUBIS ANGELICAL

by Manuel Puig ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 1986

The title notwithstanding, there's almost nothing here of the fey kitschiness marking early Puig--but there's also less of the mystifying but compelling storytelling between characters that's to be found in Kiss of the Spider Woman and Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. What remains is a constellation of three major elements: first, a fable (straight out of a silly 30's movie: the most beautiful woman in the world finding herself married to a German munitions maker--and kept virtual hostage at his estate), which in turn bleeds, second, into a dialogue conducted between the beautiful woman and an Argentine woman apparently dying of cancer in a Mexico City hospital in 1956; and, finally, there is a futuristic fantasy involving an intelligence agent (female) named W128 in an age after this one--when sexual and political wrongs are sedulously being righted. The last is the theme, mirrored in the other two sections: a woman's lot--a South American woman's lot in particular, an Argentinean woman's even more focusedly. Unfortunately, only the dialogic section between the 50's woman, Anita, and her friend Beatriz (plus an ex-lover who visits her before returning to Argentina to enroll in the byzantine alleyways of Peronist politics: Peronism is given a short history here that's very cogent, incidentally) works: the allegorical rest is willful but vague. Puig is giving feminist fiction a try, it would seem--but the inspiration feels forced.

Pub Date: Dec. 8, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Vintage/Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION