Manuel Puig's book, Blood of Requited Love, was not one of my favorite books. The narrator (Josamar) offers a jumbled, untrustworthy monologue about his life, saying things happened one way, and then another, as he recounts his childhood and his current situation as a young man with totally shattered dreams.
He portrays himself as a remarkable boy and teenager, whose prowess at soccer and love know no bounds. But we are given clues first, then recanted accounts of parts of his narrative, and we see that his childhood was really as an abused, lonely and alienated child. And we realize as his brags about his love life, that this is all fantasy and than his current situation, very poor and unable to get ahead, is the reason he tries to imagine a better past.
But the confused narrative did not work well for me, and while I could sympathize with him to a certain extent for his current conditions, I also had a bit of antipathy towards him, finding him annoying and even silly, in a sleazy kind of way. His resentment of his father (and a cow) are overwrought (especially the cow) and ultimately so immature that my annoyance grew even more.
Josamar can find no foothold to fulfill the dreams that once seemed attainable. But those dreams were from a troubled adolescence, and that he still clings to them is troubling. I don't deny that Manuel Puig may have been trying to get these feelings evoked...but that does not make me enjoy the work any better.
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Great article!!!Maybe the blogg http://www.manuelpuig.blogspot.com will interest you. I posted some interviews he made during 1968 and 1992. All these articles are part of the first multimedia-biography on CD-ROM about Puig: „Manuel Puig: Una aproximación biográfica". Buenos Aires 2008. ISBN 978-987-05-4332-9. Distribution via: http://www.manuelpuig.de
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