Synopsis
Two elderly Argentine sisters, Luci and Nidia, live in exile in Brazil, where they witness the suffering caused by the need to be loved
Reviews
The last novel by the late author of Kiss of the Spider Woman , this book uses dialogue, letters and police transcripts to tell the story of two elderly sisters from Buenos Aires, now living in Brazil. Luci, the younger of the two, has befriended a middle-aged psychologist whose love for a widower has been mostly unrequited. When Luci goes to Lucerne to visit her eldest son, the older sister, Nidia, inadvertently enables the young night watchman of the complex to seduce her 13-year-old companion. Puig develops these two plot lines concurrently, with the sisters providing the narrative link between them. As age and infirmity catch up to the octogenarian protagonists, they become increasingly starved for new revelations of their neighbors' lives. Once again Puig skillfully interweaves his two central concerns, the painful necessity of love and the fascination of narrative. Because he has eschewed a consistent narrative voice here, opting instead for a montage of artifacts and dialogue, the novel lacks a certain depth, but his delineation of the character of the elderly ladies is deft. The result is a poignant, bittersweet tale from one of Latin America's most accomplished writers.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Puig, who died last year, could have titled his collected fiction Codependency Forever! A demonic web-maker, a soap-opera-ish complicator, he was an art-novelist almost cruelly determined to keep his authorial voice out of the picture altogether. Here, solely in the most mundane dialogue and through discomfortingly plain letters, he tells the ``story'' of two old sisters who live in Rio--Nidia and Luci--both from Argentina originally and both living what at first seem utterly vicarious lives. Luci is taken up with the romantic entanglements of a neighbor woman, a psychologist; while Nidia--once Luci leaves to visit her son in Switzerland--becomes enmeshed in the pathetic goings-on of her building's doorman, one of Rio's underclass. Luci dies in Europe, a fact that everyone tries to keep from Nidia (who's also not long before lost a grown daughter to cancer)--and for a while, Nidia's letters are sent into the void. But if Puig has an agenda, it may be that no story is void-bound; for everyone talks to everyone else, is involved in everyone else's life, as mere puzzle pieces of one greater story still. The psychologist neighbor becomes just as transmittingly involved in the old ladies' lives as they were in hers; and Puig manages to stuff an awful lot of psychology and sociology and humor into the flattest of fictional textures. Nidia and Luci are adorable dupes--but, Puig seems to say, who isn't? An extraordinary novel from a very special writer. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
A pair of elderly sisters living in tropical Brazilian exile from "stinking old Argentina," where winters can be rough, embody Puig's conviction that life moves on waves of desire and regret. It's not that the sisters reminisce so much as gossip, dissecting the appetencies of their neighbors. There is, for example, Silvia the psychologist who between patients goes chasing a widower with grown children, and kindly married Ronaldo who seduces a mere child. As in all of Puig's fiction, nothing much happens--the one sister who survives at the end of the novel steals a blanket from Aerolineas Argentinas and gets away with it, and everyone seems to complain about the cost of long-distance phone calls--but personalities are laid bare in their eagerness to be victimized. Puig's final novel--he died in July 1990--is recommended for general readers.
-Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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