Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman is many novels in one. It’s a political critique of unlimited right-wing power; a psycho-emotional exploration of state terror and incarceration; an interior dreamscape; and a redemptive love story between two prisoners, the apolitical window dresser Molina and the committed leftist guerrillero Valentin.
Most of the novel is told in dialogue. These long, complex, emotionally fraught conversations read as if they are word-for-word transcripts of the prisoners’ secretly taped encounters. Some sequences feel like jazz, others play like hallucinations. There are dazzling, surreal, stream-of-consciousness internal monologues – extended fever dreams inspired by Faulkner and Joyce. There are also chilling police reports on the ruling junta’s efforts to spy on the newly released Molina. And there are scores of lengthy footnotes detailing Freud’s analysis of homosexuality and the elimination of repression (the association of sex and sin), as well as Herbert Marcuse’s championing of the “free flow of the libido”
Source : foxnews
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