Briefs

Maybe I shouldn't have taken him to the movies so much," Manuel Puig's mother would reflect some year's after her son's death in 1990. And yet, if it hadn't been for those early, indelible screenings of Blood and Sand and other 35-millimeter dreams, there may never have been a Manuel Puig. The most fascinating passages of Suzanne Jill Levine's biography, Manuel Puig and The Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (Fartar, Straus and Giroux), have nothing to do with Puig's reputation as a Latin American literary maverick who elevated melodramatic artifice into literature with his novels, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. Instead, the most revealing pages detail Puig's single-minded obsession with the glamour of vintage Hollywood. Openly disdainful of intellectual chatter, Puig even abstained from conversations about the sociopolitical themes in his own work. Discussions with the author invariably reverted to Topic A: Lana, Bette, and Marlene. Levine translated many of Puig's manuscripts and befriended him in his later years. Rather than compromise her objectivity, however, their personal ties seem to have enhanced Levine's microscopic research.