Heartbreak Tango: A Serial

Manuel Puig

Penguin Books, 1996 - Fiction - 224 pages

Juan Carlos, a self-styled ladies' man, is dying of tuberculosis. The four women in his life keep watch over him: his doting mother, his vigilant, protective sister, and the two current loves of his life--one a portrait of purity, the other as wicked as she is seductive.They all bemoan Juan's cruel destiny, and their devotion to him is so encompassing that their own lives are forgotten in the shadow of his decline.

About the author

Author Manuel Puig was born in General Villegas, Argentina on December 28, 1932. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968) is an innovative novel narrating through a variety of techniques the story of a young Argentine boy who lives vicariously through the movies. Puig uses the phenomenon of compulsive movie-going as a symbol for alienation and escape from reality. Heartbreak Tango (1969) evokes the spiritual emptiness of the Argentine provincial life in the 1930s and the vulgarity of popular music and the soap opera. His best known work, Kiss of the Spider Woman (1979), was adapted as a film in 1985 and as a Broadway musical in 1993. He died of a heart attack on July 22, 1990.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Heartbreak Tango: A Serial; Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics Series
• Author: Manuel Puig
• Translated by: Suzanne Jill Levine
• Publisher: Penguin Books, 1996
• ISBN: 0140189971, 9780140189971
• Length: 224 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / City Life; Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary