Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. (El beso de la Mujer Araña)

El Beso de la Mujer Arañ, or Kiss of the Spider Woman is a novel by Argentine Manuel Puig. Two convicts, Molina and Valntin develop a relationship of more than just friends while the live out their days in a prison cell. Valentin a political prisoner, who is a romantic revolutionary who we believe, though it is never clarified if he is the leader of a revolutionary group attempting to bring down the current government in place. Molina an openly gay window-dresser is serving a sentence for pedophilia and having intimate relations with a minor. The two men are exact opposites of each other in an interesting contrast between the two. As the story develops so does the men’s relationship and we see a change in both the characters.

The novel on its own has a unique structure, it does not follow any traditional narrative structure and the narrator is not all that clear. Not you’re typical fiction story but nonetheless it creates a world purely through the use of dialogue amongst the characters with no hint as to who is talking or narrating. What the novel does, perhaps with all due intention or just by luck is the manner in which the audience has to take follow the thread of the story closely due to the absents of a dominant character(s) and or narrator.

The footnotes included by Puig are an interesting aspect of the novel. In a way these footnotes along with the analysis of homosexuality in the novel create a fictional story that is not that farfetched as we see with other fiction novels. The reader or audience is given a larger role than in many other works of literature, as he or she has to participate and be active while reading Kiss of the Spider Woman. In a way these footnotes of the novel, help bring some truth or maybe even trivia to the overall story. In closing it is not my favorite novel, but it is a good one with an interesting approach at narrating a fictional story.