From the beginning of his career as a novelist, Puig has been an international writer in that his narrative material and his own experience have not been limited to the Hispanic culture of his native Argentina. Puig grew up in a small town, General Villegas, which is transformed into Coronel Vallejos in Heartbreak Tango. He was educated in Argentina and in Rome, where he studied cinema and worked as a film director, and he has spent much of his life in European cities and in New York. The titles of his novels indicate both his international experience and the force of North American culture in South American life. One of his narratives, Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas (1980; An Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, 1982), was written first in English, revised in Spanish for publication, and then rewritten in an English edition that incorporated the Spanish revisions. Boquitas pintadas was made into a film in 1974 (known in English as Painted Lips) by the Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, and The Kiss of the Spider Woman was filmed in 1985 with an international cast and was directed by Hector Babenco.

The later novels of Puig are more clearly political than Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and Heartbreak Tango. Although the political themes seem at times to be directed at the oppression of Latin American governments, they are in fact an attack on the cultural oppression that pervades Western societies, an oppression characterized by the rigid definition of sex roles. The prevalence in Puig’s novels of references to popular cultural stereotypes is a critique of the influence of the mass media in reinforcing sexual attitudes. The importance of homosexual characters in the later novels is indicative of Puig’s interest in the manifestation of those attitudes in the formal and informal institutions of society.

Puig’s popularity as a novelist is limited somewhat by the narrative devices that render his novels accessible and attractive only to more sophisticated readers. His view of the mores and prejudices of society and his implied criticism of its attitudes toward sexual roles make his novels somewhat controversial, but at the same time they explain the prominence of his work in the context of the outstanding fiction produced by the important Latin American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Ernesto Sábato, Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mario Vargas Llosa, and José Donoso.