Two pathological liars -- an amnesiac former Argentinian dissident and an under-achieving academic -- spin tales as they probe each other's personalities. The games they play with each other are not unlike those in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and there seems to be a similar undercurrent of misanthropy.

The obvious conclusion that I was expecting (a former Nazi being hounded by the Humans Rights commission) never materialized. In fact, the conclusion is rather unsatisfying. Instead of a revelation as to the past or identity of the amnesiac expat, we are given a clear end to the relationship and a few clues as to the character of the academic. ( )

a book that's always building a trap for itself to fall into and then skipping over it with an annoying grin...

really brilliant though—painful, sardonic, depressive, sappy, cutting, funny, hypnotic... even if it was a bit of a slow read for me

Argentina born author Manuel Puig doesn’t shy away from experimentation. His best known work, Kiss of the Spider Woman, has no traditional first person or objective third person narrator; rather the novel consists of a dialogue between two prison inmates punctuated by stream-of-consciousness along with a few references to classified government reports.

Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages goes even further in the direction of novel as dialogue: other than a handful of letters and a job application tucked in at the conclusion, its entire 230-pages contain a succession of conversations between two men: Juan José Ramirez, a 74-year-old former political prisoner in Argentina who has a failing memory and is confined to a wheelchair, and Larry John, a divorced 36-year-old native of New York City and former college history instructor who is hired to push Mr. Ramirez around the city a few times each week.

One further note on style: there are no character attributions, that is, there are no Mr. Ramirez said or Larry said nor are there the usual quotation marks - instead the left hand side of each page is filled with dashes (-) to indicate a change of speaker. In this way Mr. Puig gives a reader the feeling she or he is standing next to the two men, overhearing their verbal exchange. This novel would make an excellent candidate for a Masterpiece Theater-style series - the producers could simply use the book's exact words from beginning to end.

For a number of years Manuel Puig lived in New York City. Eternal Curse is the one and only novel he wrote in English. Here’s the opening: its December 1977, in Greenwich Village, the location of the rehabilitation center where Mr. Ramirez is currently a resident, having been placed there by a human rights organization. Larry, who suffers from bouts of depression and has been working menial jobs, mostly part-time, for the past several years is now wheeling Mr. Ramirez through Washington Square. The older man begins asking the younger man a series of probing questions, to which Larry replies: “I’m paid to push your wheelchair, not give you my philosophy of life.”

But shortly thereafter, following a round of deeply personal inquiries posed by the old Argentinean, sharing his philosophy of life is exactly what Larry winds up doing, which proves the alchemy to bind the two men in the coils of a tight, unsettling connection.

Both Larry and Mr. Ramirez are susceptible to what nowadays we term codependency: as a boy, Larry was abused both emotionally and physically by his father and now yearns for a wholesome relationship with a father figure; Mr. Ramirez is racked by guilt over the suffering and death he caused his son back in Argentina. And to add fuel to the psychoanalytic fire, at different points the two men slide into role playing and speak directly to one another as father and son.

Yet again another aspect of their relationship is the whole issue of honesty. Is Larry being honest when he admits he killed a Vietnamese civilian when fighting in the army in Vietnam? Did he murder an older man during a savage struggle in a dilapidated Greenwich Village apartment building? In his turn, is Mr. Ramirez telling the truth or bending the truth about how much he remembers of his life in Argentina or how reliable his memory regarding more recent events? Such uncertainties add depth and tension as the men play out their respective parts in the unfolding tragicomedy.

Eventually we discover the origin of the book’s disquieting title. Given the opportunity to finally have access to the journal Mr. Ramirez kept while a prisoner in an Argentine dungeon, Larry reads the very first line: “Eternal curse on the reader of these pages.” Deeper into the conversation, Larry makes the bold statement the old man in the wheelchair must have been a terror on his feet. Juan José Ramirez reacts sharply: “There’s no proof of that . . . none at all. There will never be.” One can detect a hint of defensiveness, perhaps alluding to the fact that he was himself an instigator of terror and torture prior to a reversal of fortune wherein he became the one tortured.

Reading a book where plot, character, mood, setting are all developed through dialogue is a unique and somewhat unusual experience. Not nearly as peculiar as reading A Void by George Perec, a novel written without using the letter “e” but it’s a close cousin.

A psychological tale with Freudian and Oedipal overtones, Eternal Curse may bring to mind Samuel Beckett or Jean-Paul Sartre, most especially, at least for me, Sartre’s No Exit, a play where three people, two women and a man, sit in a room in the afterlife and discover hell is other people. In Manuel Puig’s novel, two men reach a similar conclusion right here on earth.



"I guess what was coming alive at the time was my capacity for pleasure. But my mother would throw out all my books. There is a chapter in Sartre's Being and Nothingness called "The Body." She thought the book was pornographic and threw it out. What she didn't understand and what gave me pleasure were suspicious to her." - Manuel Puig, Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages ( )

Argentina born author Manuel Puig doesn’t shy away from experimentation. His best known work, Kiss of the Spider Woman, has no traditional first person or objective third person narrator; rather the novel consists of a dialogue between two prison inmates punctuated by stream-of-consciousness along with a few references to classified government reports.

Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages goes even further in the direction of novel as dialogue: other than a handful of letters and a job application tucked in at the conclusion, its entire 230-pages contain a succession of conversations between two men: Juan José Ramirez, a 74-year-old former political prisoner in Argentina who has a failing memory and is confined to a wheelchair, and Larry John, a divorced 36-year-old native of New York City and former college history instructor who is hired to push Mr. Ramirez around the city a few times each week.

One further note on style: there are no character attributions, that is, there are no Mr. Ramirez said or Larry said nor are there the usual quotation marks - instead the left hand side of each page is filled with dashes (-) to indicate a change of speaker. In this way Mr. Puig gives a reader the feeling she or he is standing next to the two men, overhearing their verbal exchange. This novel would make an excellent candidate for a Masterpiece Theater-style series - the producers could simply use the book's exact words from beginning to end.

For a number of years Manuel Puig lived in New York City. Eternal Curse is the one and only novel he wrote in English. Here’s the opening: its December 1977, in Greenwich Village, the location of the rehabilitation center where Mr. Ramirez is currently a resident, having been placed there by a human rights organization. Larry, who suffers from bouts of depression and has been working menial jobs, mostly part-time, for the past several years is now wheeling Mr. Ramirez through Washington Square. The older man begins asking the younger man a series of probing questions, to which Larry replies: “I’m paid to push your wheelchair, not give you my philosophy of life.”

But shortly thereafter, following a round of deeply personal inquiries posed by the old Argentinean, sharing his philosophy of life is exactly what Larry winds up doing, which proves the alchemy to bind the two men in the coils of a tight, unsettling connection.

Both Larry and Mr. Ramirez are susceptible to what nowadays we term codependency: as a boy, Larry was abused both emotionally and physically by his father and now yearns for a wholesome relationship with a father figure; Mr. Ramirez is racked by guilt over the suffering and death he caused his son back in Argentina. And to add fuel to the psychoanalytic fire, at different points the two men slide into role playing and speak directly to one another as father and son.

Yet again another aspect of their relationship is the whole issue of honesty. Is Larry being honest when he admits he killed a Vietnamese civilian when fighting in the army in Vietnam? Did he murder an older man during a savage struggle in a dilapidated Greenwich Village apartment building? In his turn, is Mr. Ramirez telling the truth or bending the truth about how much he remembers of his life in Argentina or how reliable his memory regarding more recent events? Such uncertainties add depth and tension as the men play out their respective parts in the unfolding tragicomedy.

Eventually we discover the origin of the book’s disquieting title. Given the opportunity to finally have access to the journal Mr. Ramirez kept while a prisoner in an Argentine dungeon, Larry reads the very first line: “Eternal curse on the reader of these pages.” Deeper into the conversation, Larry makes the bold statement the old man in the wheelchair must have been a terror on his feet. Juan José Ramirez reacts sharply: “There’s no proof of that . . . none at all. There will never be.” One can detect a hint of defensiveness, perhaps alluding to the fact that he was himself an instigator of terror and torture prior to a reversal of fortune wherein he became the one tortured.

Reading a book where plot, character, mood, setting are all developed through dialogue is a unique and somewhat unusual experience. Not nearly as peculiar as reading A Void by George Perec, a novel written without using the letter “e” but it’s a close cousin.

A psychological tale with Freudian and Oedipal overtones, Eternal Curse may bring to mind Samuel Beckett or Jean-Paul Sartre, most especially, at least for me, Sartre’s No Exit, a play where three people, two women and a man, sit in a room in the afterlife and discover hell is other people. In Manuel Puig’s novel, two men reach a similar conclusion right here on earth. ( )

From South America we here have another story of political upheaval, imprisonment, torture, and exile, the sad story told by Roberto Bolaño in his work, and by many so many others. Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages focuses less on the fact of exile than on the relationship of the elderly Mr. Ramirez, late of Argentina, and the man Larry hired to push his wheelchair around the NYC neighborhood where they live not far from each other, one in a nursing home, the other in a low-rent slummy apartment. All they know about each other is what they tell each other, and of course that's all we know about them, and the facts of their lives are thus quite unstable.

Without a narrator, characters have to say things people don't normally say, and awkward moments in Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages arise from reliance on dialogue, with a few documents at the end to wrap up the story. Another kind of awkwardness comes from the coincidence that the wheelchair-pusher has an advanced degree in history...but the English of Mr. Ramirez is also awkward, as is his very position in his own country and the US, and Larry's surely is also, so somehow all this awkwardness becomes a motif of the work, the difficulty of finding one's place in the world.

Four stars because it's a pleasure to read and understand, because the characters are affecting in their very different ways, and because it's intermittently funny in a quiet way. I have no memory of what Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, which I read decades ago, was about, but Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages has made me want to revisit it, and discover his other translated works.