Kiss of the Spider Woman

Title: Kiss of the Spider Woman
Author: Manuel Puig
Published: This Vintage edition is from 1986. Originally published in 1979.
Genre: Drama
Pages: 281



My mom -and her mom, too, this kinda runs in the family- was a voracious reader. No, she's not dead, but with eye issues and other things, she's moved more to the telly-department. Also, easier to knit with telly than with a book. She also likes movies: romantic ones, drama, the usual soaps. Annnd Kiss of the Spider Woman which, once I was old enough to watch it myself, is like nothing I've imagined her liking. The odd one out, but she just loves it. I was (once again) hunting the movie for her for xmas, and having liked it myself, too, decided to check out the book.


Almost entirely dialogue, Kiss of the Spider Woman is the story of Molina and Valentin, two men stuck in the same prison cell in Buenos Aires. Molina, a hopeless romantic incarcerated for his sexual dealings, spends days and nights telling Valentin, a young politican prisoner, about all of his favourite movies, re-creating them in words to pass the days and nights. There's also a bunch of footnotes, the length of which would put Mr. Pratchett to shame. The two men are almost complete opposites of each other, but as they're stuck together without a chance of escape, they start to affect each other, to learn things that might not come out in any other circumstances.

Not a very conventional book, but enthralling, the dialogue, footnotes and especially Molina's movies transporting the reader to a different time and place. It was sometimes difficult to follow who's saying what, due to the book mostly being like the little snippet below, but Molina and Valentin do have such different voices that you learn to recognise them. Definitely a touching book. I can see why my mom loves the movie so.


- What about the film? Give me a break...
- Know what I better do? Put the potatoes on to boil, because they take a year. 
- What are you making? 
- We have some ham, and I'll open up a tin of olive oil, so we can have a couple of boiled potatoes, with just a drop of oil and salt, together with the ham: nothing could be healthier. 
- The film was up to where the black housekeeper's about to tell the protagonist the whole story about the zombie wife, about the living dead woman.
- You're really into it, aren't you? Admit it.
- It's entertaining.
- Oh sure. Baloney. It's more than entertaining, it's superb. Tell the truth.
- Come on, what happens?
- Okay, okay, but wait...


Regarding the Reading Bingo, I've been thinking about how to define A Forgotten Classic. I'm pretty sure I could tick this as one. As mentioned, this is one of my mother's favourite movies. It is impossible to find a European region DVD. I have looked. For years. I've bugged several movie shop and used movie shop clerks. I've happily bought copies over the internet, only to be told by the seller that You are aware this is Region 1/no subtitles/somehow odd, right? I've bought a Region free copy, which turned up in a Korean package, with no English subtitles. I wasn't expecting Finnish subs, but not even English ones? Mom's English is good, but she's going to need some help. So, this being the case, and considering that the book is probably less well-known, at least in these parts of the world, I'm gonna go ahead and tick this as A Forgotten Classic.