It has been said of Manuel Puig (General Villegas, 1932-Cuernavaca, 1990) that he came from the future, and now that that future has arrived, he still seems from the future, ergo his modernity has not expired, he is advanced and challenging even for today. It was a strange planet in its day but if it were discovered tomorrow it would cause no less astonishment.
The irony is that he built his poetry from materials that move between nostalgia and the laughable, distant stars like Hollywood melodramas, soap operas, serials, glossy magazine gossip... but whose narrative possibilities he redefined with glasses whose full design may be figured out in the 22nd century.
Seen in this way, perhaps he was a retrofuturist, an individual who built a time machine that only traveled forward –a novel thematically and formally dislocated from its historical moment– but whose fuel was past ghosts (the mechanisms of the popular and today languishing genres of mass culture).
Seix Barral's recovery of his eight novels –of the first one, La treason de Rita Hayworth (1968), a reckoning with the suffocating provincialism of his childhood that finds in the cinema a point of escape but also a trap, to the The last one, Tropical Night Falls (1988), or gossip as a subterfuge to hide one's own sentimental desolation– allows one to enter a recreational park where each attraction provokes recognition and defamiliarization, where dreams and terror, fantasy and fright, are they touch and are confused.
Destructive passions, silenced sexual preferences, exile, emotional and political violence, imposture, illness, games of domination, loneliness... Puig's centrifuge does not tolerate simple fabrics and the program that brings them together draws on a variety of sources documentaries: tangos, film dialogues, private diaries, letters, files, conversations, mental detours, songs...
Technically he was a voracious explorer, twisting the genres (the psychological novel, the police novel, the thriller, the serial...), reproducing everyday speech, systematically renouncing the narrator in the third person, relentlessly shifting the narrative focus, coming to raise novels based on the transcripts of the interviews given by a bricklayer in Rio and a university student whom he met in a New York swimming pool... Without intending it, he was more postmodern than any contemporary with avant-garde views practicing on the other side of the Atlantic.
The highly varied profile of the prologue writers for these reissues is not only proof of the author's gift for appealing to very heterogeneous sensibilities –his ascendancy was already recognized by authors such as Murakami or Foster Wallace– but, even if we know little about the fictional work of some of the signatories –and here I would highlight names such as Paulina Flores, Bob Pop, Tamara Tenenbaum, María Dueñas and Camila Sosa Villada–, offer us clues about the literary universe of the honoree.
Grandson of a Barcelona anarchist who never fit in with an Argentina that repudiated his homosexuality and his political commitment to the left, that censored his work and pushed him into exile; film student in Rome who soon understood that the most useful thing about it was the sentimental education that had served him and the possibility of experimenting on paper with his language; repudiated by much of the Latin American boom and academic criticism for considering that he trafficked in sentimentality and kitsch.
Puig defined himself as a defender of individual freedom who was interested in revealing the impostures, simulations and concealments that deeply harm us, while building affective bridges and weaving emotional ties between strangers, all for the sake of combining the pleasure of entertainment with social complaint.
As Claudia Piñeiro points out in the prologue to Eternal Curse to whoever reads these pages: “What happiness the way in which she breaks –as many times as necessary– with the conventions of writing”. If you want to go back to the future, Manuel Puig offers you eight flights.
