book club: kiss of the spider woman by manuel puig

In the Grizzly Gazette book club, we've voted on reading Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig next, suggested by Psycheoma. We kinda lost sight of the book club and posting it in time :p

I've struggled with reading fiction for a while now; I manage to squeeze some in here and there, like when I read The Dispossessed 3 years ago and loved it, but most of the books I own and end up finishing are non-fiction. It wasn't always this way, especially as a child, but the older I got, the more I felt pressured to read things that had an obvious "return of investment".

Fiction can teach you a lot in unexpected ways, but you never know whether it will just be a nice story for you, or something that makes you think of life, society or yourself differently, and in which ways that will be. You have to start reading and trust the process, just enjoying it for what it is, and let it give you whatever it ends up being, even when it is not life-changing or improving on anything.

Meanwhile, buying a book specifically about a specific topic/field or an autobiography immediately tells you upfront what you can expect and what you'll be taught, no surprises. Having read it carries the promise of improving in that area or at least having valuable knowledge. I like that predictability and usefulness, and I am a very impatient person with a tough schedule at times, so I am unfortunately obsessed with not wasting my time.

After all these years of barely any fiction reading, I've become lazy and inflexible. It's now so, so hard for me to give books a chance without knowing definitively if I'll enjoy them and what I'll take away from them. Non-fiction is easy for me to read because I already have a reason to care: Me. I'll relate it all back to me, and my interests, what I already know, or who or what I want to be. Anything that is not relevant or interesting to me can be disregarded in self help.

Fiction challenges that, because the beginning of a book will just present me with characters that do not yet give me a reason to care. I don't know them, I don't know anything about them yet, and I cannot relate them back to me. I'll have to sit there patiently until everything is slowly revealed and the characters become more than random names on a page, and may be completely unlike me. That isn't easy for me, but I'd like to change.

I went in completely blind. I had not looked up anything about it and had no idea what to expect.

The narrative style (a dialogue without names showing who says what, but it becomes apparent when you continue reading and see how they refer to each other) is definitely a surprise and took me a while to detect and get used to, but then it is fairly easy to read and understand. I was done with it after 2 days, in which I read for about 4-5 hours in the morning.

The book released in 1976 centers two prisoners in Buenos Aires in 1975, one a trans woman referred to as Molina (her last name), the other a man named Valentín. While Molina is incarcerated for "corrupting a minor", Valentín is a political prisoner because of his involvement with a revolutionary group.

The story is told through their dialogue, which is mostly Molina describing movie plots to Valentín, many of them centering on romance and having real life equivalents. Through discussing the movies, they occasionally reveal things about their outside life or themselves. Later on, the story continues through written reports by a third party.

Molina's gender is mostly not acknowledged; she repeatedly states she sees herself as a woman and is not a man, yet the prison system and even Valentín continue to misgender her and simply see her as a homosexual man. Even the English Wikipedia page makes no mention of it.

(Spoilers ahead)

After about half of the book, it gets revealed that Molina is in this cell together with Valentín because she is cooperating with the prison on getting more information out of him so they can arrest more members of the group. Her meetings with the warden are covered up by getting groceries and pretending they were brought by her mother and lawyer, and her incentive is an early pardon.

While everyone involved seems to not (fully) acknowledge Molina as a woman, they are absolutely aware that she is queer, to them an effeminate gay man, and use what they associate with that femininity to their own gain. And Molina indeed fits the bill: A caring and romantic person who wants to be liked, wants to help people and build a bond. She helps Valentín as he is sick from food that was intentionally tampered with to weaken him, makes him food and tea, even washes his stuff and gives him hers when he shits himself from it. She even has sex with him, seemingly consensual.

It reminded me a lot of the practice of V-coding, which is the common practice of placing trans women in the same prison cell as male inmates to placate them. The idea is that by getting to rape the trans woman, he'd become calmer and more docile. It's absolutely horrible. While in this book, Molina apparently wasn't raped and wasn't just placed there to calm down an aggressor, she nonetheless seems to have been used specifically for her femininity and willingness to have sex with men, in the hopes to break through the walls of a very closed-off man and get some intel. The warden and sergeant even toy with the idea to release Molina, orchestrate a fake admission by her and surveil her in the hopes that the revolutionary group would seek her out to get revenge, which would give them a chance to pounce. It's a great fictional, but sadly very realistic case showing how far the justice system was (and is) willing to go to abuse and endanger queer people if it helps their investigations.

Molina seems to want to be a neutral party to all of this initially; telling the warden openly she's making no progress, but asking for extensions. She has become attached to Valentín, and who knows who else she could be matched up with? It could be worse. At the same time, she gets multiple chances to press him on his political contacts but chooses not to, even one time telling him that she'd like to hear anything else but the name of his comrades. She fears that they could interrogate her and she'd spill, both betraying him and painting a target on her back after her release. Slowly, she changes her mind, and Valentín convinces her to relay messages to his comrades once she is out, telling her who to call, where and how. He wants her to get involved with the group(s) too.

Unfortunately, she gets surveilled for longer than Valentín said she could expect, and in ways she possibly failed to detect after a while. Thinking she was safe, she makes moves that make it obvious to surveillance that she is reaching out to the group and trying to get picked up by them. Sadly, at one final attempt (which already seemed decently hopeless and dangerous to Molina, as she already withdrew all she could from her bank account and left it to her mum), she gets nabbed by agents just as members of the group drive by to kill her and wound an agent, likely to prevent her from spilling anything. It feels tragic, another trans woman killed, used as cannon fodder, used in the agenda of the men around her, just seeking for connection, love, a bigger purpose. One can only hope she felt at peace as she died for a supposedly greater good.

Meanwhile, Valentín is still in prison, getting tortured during interrogations. He thinks of both Marta, his love, and Molina, as his mind drifts off on a high dose of morphine in the infirmary, even mixing them up. He regrets what happened to Molina because of him.

My wife asked me if it was a fun book. Kinda depends on the definition... I was interested in it enough that I was able to read it for hours on end. Was I truly excited or gripped, always expecting the next turn or twist soon? Mostly no, it was very predictable in the sense that the prison days would pass and another movie would be discussed; I think I was only glued to the paper when the surveillance reports came up, because I wanted to know how Molina would act - would she really follow his instructions, and what was her support network outside like? I wasn't laughing or crying either, I had no strong emotions, but it was nice to read, it kept me company, it filled my time in a way that didn't feel like a waste.

It's not a book I would put on a list of recommendations, but if anyone was planning to read it or asking if it was any good, I'd encourage them to.

Published 28 Sep, 2026