Blood of Requited Love

1999
Author:

Manuel Puig
Translated by Jan L. Grayson

Cruel love and heartbreak remembered.

This inventive novel is a series of questions and confessional answers, an internal dialogue between Josemar, a construction worker, and Maria, a privileged young woman as they look back at the teenage passion they shared ten years before. Back in print after being unavailable for several years, this novel is a moving work that combines the high drama of pulp fiction with Puig’s acclaimed, incisive writing style.

One of Puig’s best novels.

American Book Review

This inventive novel is a series of questions and confessional answers, an internal dialogue between Josemar, a construction worker, and Maria, a privileged young woman. Looking back at the teenage passion they shared from the remove of ten years, they try to reconstruct their story despite the obstacles of time’s passage, societal disapproval, and family pressure. Set in a provincial Brazilian town, Blood of Requited Love explores memory and its failings, self-deception and its costs, and the hidden manacles of machismo. Back in print after being unavailable for several years, this novel is a moving work that combines the high drama of pulp fiction with Puig’s acclaimed, incisive writing style.


Manuel Puig (1932–1990) was born in a small town in the Argentine pampas. Before becoming a writer, he studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and worked in the film industry in Rome. Best known for his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, which has been adapted as a movie and a Broadway musical, Puig also wrote Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Heartbreak Tango, and The Buenos Aires Affair.

One of Puig’s best novels.

American Book Review

Puig is brilliantly inventive.

New York Times

Both a funny writer and a tenderly elegiac one.

Newsweek