The Betrayal of Rita Hayworth

Life is nothing but a puddle of mud, and the only way to endure it is to wander in the fantasy of dreams. A portrait of the sensitive young man's soul, the worldly tears and laughter of the people in the small town. Vargas Llosa, Haruki Murakami, and Dai Jinhua all praised Wong Kar-wai's favorite Argentine writer🎆
Editor's Recommendation★ The simplified Chinese version of Manuel Puig's debut work, a representative writer of Latin America's "post-literary boom" period, is introduced for the first time.
He is an important postmodernist writer in contemporary Argentina and the "Dream Knight of the Pampas". "His writing transforms many postmodern keywords into vivid and rich literary facts."
★ A spiritual portrait of a sensitive boy, and the worldly laughter and tears of the people in a small town.
Puig's semi-autobiographical work gives us a glimpse into the writer's magnificent inner world when he was young: "Duoduo is me."
The chaos of youth, stirring love, hidden scandals, unspeakable frustrations, and the impermanence of life and death: a popular psychological portrait of the people in the small town.
★ A cinephilic text inspired by Hollywood, with an intertwined narrative of reality and fantasy.
Puig loves Hollywood movies from the 1930s and 1940s. The screen goddess Rita Hayworth became part of the title of his novel because of her screen image of a heartless and unfaithful girl. Puig once wrote a letter to her to introduce the novel.
The ordinary and cruel life in the Pampas, the fantasy world inspired by movies such as "The Great Ziegfeld", "Blood and Yellow Sand", "The Short Night", and "Spring Dawn on the Green Bank"... the reality and fantasy are intertwined, fiction and reality are entangled, generating Puig's unique cinephilic text.
★ A group portrait of "sounds" like a flock of flying birds, a gentle and sincere whispering atmosphere, and a lush and flourishing queer aesthetic.
The book is divided into chapters and written in various genres, including multi-person dialogues, phone calls, monologues, essays, diaries, and letters. Spliced ​​together using montage techniques, the "voices" are vividly portrayed, as if they were right beside your ears.
The public is fascinated by sharing their innermost thoughts and are also keen to discuss other people's secrets. Puig captures the human instinct to peek in. The daily lives of housewives, mothers, neighbors, and small-time hooligans are all captured in his writing, which is gentle and sincere, brimming with vibrant vitality.
★ Designed by renowned designer Xihe, the main visual element is the lazy and charming image of Rita Hayworth, supplemented by the color scheme of Wong Kar-wai's films and poster-style text layout.
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Synopsis: Vallejos in the Pampas is a typical southern Latin American town: it is a place of rolling sand and dull life, but it also breeds all kinds of rumors and love affairs. Everyone has loneliness and secrets hidden in their hearts, longing to catch a glimpse of light in the mediocrity.
The only joy in life for the little boy Duoduo is going to the cinema with his mother. Only when the movie starts does his life come alive. However, the dazzling and beautiful female stars also become the source of his inner conflict. As the truth of life slowly unfolds before this artistic boy, he gradually learns to navigate between reality and the dreams created by the big screen, weaving his own stories and embarking on a boundless spiritual journey...
The book is divided into chapters in the form of telephone dialogues, inner monologues, diaries, compositions, essays and letters. With gentle and sincere brushstrokes, and with blocks of humor and gossip, it depicts the many people, things and events surrounding Duoduo, sketching out a picture of life in the Pampas town.
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Media & Celebrity Reviews 🌟The innovation of Puig's work lies in the artificial, caricatured life he depicts, which excludes other aspects of life and replaces them as the sole truth. This gives his novels a unique atmosphere. Although Puig's literary vision is based on the most common human experience—escaping from the real world into the world of dreams through various forms of imagination—the world he depicts seems so distant, gorgeous, and unreal. However, at the peak of his creative power, his complex plots and intricate games exude an air of lived drama and suffering humanity.
——Vargas Llosa🌟I like Puig. His novels are centered around images, and he seems to have a deep and fundamental belief in imagination.
—Haruki Murakami 🌟Manuel Puig is not only a leading postmodernist writer in contemporary Argentina, but also a remarkable 20th-century literary figure, known for his prolific output. His writing transforms many postmodernist keywords into vibrant and rich literary facts.
—Dai Jinhua🌟By listening in on his mother, friends, and neighbors, Puig's double Duoduo pieces together a story of passion, desire, and revenge that rivals any dream created on screen. "This is a hilarious book, filled with sudden descents from seriousness to frivolity, a scene that only someone like Puig, who obsessively watched every last reel of film, could recreate for us in words."
—Alexandre Coleman 🌟 Behind this popular psychological portrait of Latin America lies a land of proletarians. They exist only because Hollywood films allow them to indulge their fantasies, allowing them to continue experiencing what they see as a parody of life... His characters are the prototypes of modern-day Madame Bovary and Don Quixote. You haven't read such heartfelt passages since you last flipped through a pulp film magazine or a romance novel... Puig's debut is stunning and utterly original.
—The New York Times
🌟An outstanding Argentine novelist, deeply influenced by Joyce and Faulkner, but extremely creative and humorous by nature.
——Library Monthly
For many people—certainly for young Puig in small-town Argentina—gossip is the original and most captivating form of storytelling: who's in love, who's broken up, who's involved in a scandal, who's been wronged (almost always told by women). There's an endless fascination with recounting other people's lives, comparing them to one's own, judging them, and embellishing them. In "The Betrayal of Rita Hayworth," Puig captures the human tendency to spy, weigh, and compare, while also exploiting that instinct in his readers... It's perhaps his most lyrical work.
—The Nation Magazine 🌟An experimenter in search of new forms of “popular literature”…a master of narrative like Faulkner.
—The New York Times

2023-10-01

贵州人民出版社

Houlang, Houlang Literature

416

9787221177186