Kiss of the Spider Woman is a novel by the Argentine writer Manuel Puig. It is considered his most successful. The novel's form is unusual in that there is no traditional narrative voice, one of the primary features of fiction. It is written in large part as dialogue, without any indication of who is speaking, except for a dash to show a change of speaker. There are also parts of stream of consciousness. What is not written as dialogue or stream of consciousness is written as metafictional government documentation. The conversations between the characters, when not focused on the moment at... hand, are recountings of films that Molina has seen, which act as a form of escape from their environment. Thus there are a main plot, several subplots, and five additional stories that comprise the novel. The author includes a long series of footnotes on the psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality. The footnotes act largely as a representation of Puig's political intention in writing the novel: to present an objective view of homosexuality. The footnotes include both factual information and that given by the fictional Anelli Taub.
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| Author: | Manuel Puig |
| Genre: | Novel, Gay novel |
| Number of editions: | 4 |