Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. First published 1976.

I first found Kiss of the Spider Woman when we watched the film based on the novel in an undergrad world literature class. I then read the screenplay, and then the novel, backwards of my usual routine – I usually read the book first and then criticize the movie when I see it! The book was written by Manuel Puig, and it tells story of two prisoners in a South American prison, Molina and Valentin. (The movie is set in Brazil, but the book doesn’t say what country it is set in and Puig was an Argentinean who lived through brutal political struggles.) In the story, Molina has been sentenced to eight years for homosexual corruption of a minor, and Valentin is a political prisoner whom the warden is attempting to force information from. Although in the beginning of the story Molina is an unwilling informant for the warden, he slowly falls in love with Valentin and begins to protect him.

The book itself is told exclusively through dialogue, forgoing even basic dialogue tags. With the exception of the last two chapters and three short conversations Molina has with the Warden, the dialogue is exclusively between these two men. At first the lack of dialogue tags was disconcerting to me as a reader, as I am used to not only being told who is speaking, but also what is going on around the characters. Puig sucked me into his method of story telling however, by starting the book with Molina telling Valentin about a movie he loved, rather than jumping into the two men’s stories.Although I didn’t expect the whole book to be told in this conversational manor, this informal beginning allowed me to become used to the style. By the third scene the personalities of the two men were becoming quite clear, and when at the start of the second chapter the movie wasn’t even mentioned until a few pages in I didn’t feel thrown off at all.

The main reason that this novel succeeded, rather than ending up a spectacular flop, is that although there are no dialogue tags, each time a new speaker starts his words are preceded by a dash. This gives the reader a visual cue that a new speaker has started, so once I grew used to it, I had no problem following the conversation. Puig was extremely consistent in his format. He further clarified the conversations, as whenever there was a spot where the reader would expect the other man to respond, but he doesn’t, Puig marks this with the dash, followed by three ellipses, as -…  to symbolize the man’s silence.

In spite of the mechanics of the book, the story itself would not have succeeded had Puig not mastered writing dialogue. Puig had to be absolutely natural with the conversations to make them not only sound real, but to convey a lot of information in a natural way. Puig also had to be well aware of the fact that he could easily loose his readers in the constant dialogue, so he made sure that each of the protagonists’ characters were distinct. Molina is emotional and tends to see much of the world through rose-colored glasses, while Valentin refuses to try and see anything other than the brutal truth he perceives. Because they are so three-dimensional to start off with, the shifts that their personalities under go are totally believable.

It is a challenge to carry off just a short story told solely in dialogue, and I was really impressed to see how Puig pulled off for a novel-length piece. I am awed by Puig’s skill, and I have recommended this book as a study to writers who were struggling with writing dialogue.