I can't remember who posted it, but not too long ago on Twitter I saw someone citing Elmore Leonard's writing/editing advice, "Try to leave out the part that people skip." This person on Twitter went on to posit something along the lines of, "What do you never skip? Dialogue." Now, I'm not a reader who's not put off by a solid block of words that may stretch on for pages, unbroken by dialogue (as my love for Javier Marías will attest). As a writer, I don't do much dialogue either. Manuel Puig falls at the complete opposite end of the spectrum: only dialogue. It takes some getting used to as a reader, and in this book it can be especially confusing because of the general unreliability of the dialogists.
Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages is, mainly, a conversation between Mr. Ramirez, an aging and unwell union organizer and activist who spent years in prison in Argentina under the dictatorship, and Larry, a history Ph.D. with Marxist sympathies who is paid to keep Mr. Ramirez company and take him on walks from his nursing home in Greenwich Village. Mr. Ramirez suffers from depression and paranoia and has forgotten much of his life before prison. He asks Larry to tell him about his life in the hopes of making connections to his own experiences and drawing out memory. Or something. Meanwhile, Larry is trying to decipher the notebooks Mr. Ramirez kept in prison, and to draw him out and make him remember his past. But contradictions and conflicting stories abound. Some of the conversations clearly exist only in Mr. Ramirez' imagination.
I read - and adored -
Kiss of the Spider Woman years ago. There were similar notes (and the similar dialogic narrative) in
Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much.
