BOOKS
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characters are comparably petty and manipulative, but the book
deals with issues and objects potentially affecting larger groups.
The implicit politic has become explicit.
Eternal Curse,
for in–
stance, stages a series of dialogues between Larry, a young man
down on his luck, and Ramirez, an aging Argentine whom he's
caring for in a Greenwich Village nursing home. In the course of
their conversations, recorded in the underfed prose of Puig's
debut in his own English, Larry discovers that the old Ramirez
has encoded his revolutionary history in some romantic novels,
which Larry then hopes to decode and publish, thereby estab–
lishing his academic career. Both men use and cruelly thwart
each other-Ramirez tries to regain a hold on his affective life
through imagination and role playing, the would-be historian
attempts to extort the documents and hence a profession. The
novel's subject nicely dovetails the psychological with the politi–
cal, expressed in an interchangeable vocabulary: "It could be an
important document about resistance to repression"; "Flirtation
and fepression go hand-in-hand, and there has to be repression
in order to derive pleasure from flirtation."
Restricting himself to the spoken words of his characters
and a few circumstantial documents, Puig has taken another
step toward successfully realizing the Jamesian goal of the fully
dramatized novel: the book itself is an updating and slimming
down of
The Aspern Papers.
But Puig's regimen is so fierce that
he has created anorexic fiction, whose control of physical form
replaces expression of feeling, leading to withering and possible
extinction. No Miss Tina collects our sympathy in
Eternal
Curse,
and Puig lets neither Larry nor Ramirez capture much in–
terest, perhaps because initially
he
was too interested. A note
printed on the novel's dust jacket quotes the author:
This novel was born of a crisis I went through. I had re–
turned
to
New York from a trip, spiritually and morally ex–
hausted. Within a few days I spotted this man, while I was
working out in a gym. He was young, healthy, handsome.
''I'd like
to
be like him," I thought. I got
to
know him and
soon discovered that he was morally bankrupt. The book is
the outcome of a series of interviews I did with him.
Eternal Curse
is a series of interviews between two spiritually
and morally exhausted individuals hankering to live off of and
