As in Puig's previous experiments, [in "Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages"] things are not as simple as they first seem. The only way Mr. Ramirez can recover a sense of his own life is to plumb Larry's past and his fantasies. What Mr. Ramirez is really seeking is some key to his own subconscious. At first the self-serving Larry is reluctant to indulge his often exasperating patient except when humoring him appears to be expedient. Gradually, though, Larry becomes caught up in Mr. Ramirez's psychological game, and the two of them begin exploring a mélange of fantasy, sex, guilt and dreams, all the therapeutic stuff of everyday post-Freudian reality.

These strange conversations between an old man who has suppressed his memory and a young man who obeys only the law of self-gratification are sometimes funny, but in general Puig has chosen to investigate the serious side of their relationship. In "Kiss of the Spider Woman," an aging homosexual and a political activist, cellmates in a Buenos Aires prison, carry on a dialogue in which the recounting of old movies creates a bond of invention between them. Similarly in "Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages," mutual fantasies, and in several episodes mutual dreams, begin to create a tentative subconscious bridge between these unlikely psychic castaways. And when Larry starts decoding Mr. Ramirez's prison journal, which opens with the title phrase, so that we (and they) begin piecing together some of Mr. Ramirez's secrets as well, their relationship becomes even more bizarre. (p. 9)

"Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages" has the unusual effect of a morbid radio play that you only listen to with your mind's ear. Puig spins a fascinating web of words, capturing the reader's attention with his uncanny ability to develop plot and character solely through dialogue. Overhearing these pathetic but sometimes riveting conversations turns one into a kind of blind voyeur listening to the twin soliloquies of two characters bent on symbiotic disintegration.

Puig's characteristic virtuosity has not failed him in this English-language experiment, which devotees of psychological fiction will no doubt appreciate; but the novel has a pared-down and displaced quality. Its reliance on psychology and its occasionally ferocious dialogue are more reminiscent of the theater of the absurd than of Puig's passionately Latin early novels. It is surely one of the vagaries of history that a noted Argentine novelist should give us a book set in New York precisely when we would like to know more about affairs in his own country. That irony is, of course, no fault of Puig, who, like so many Latin American writers, must work in exile. Seen in that context, Larry and Mr. Ramirez are dispossessed souls whose very rootlessness reveals, perhaps inadvertently, the sad truth about life in Argentina. (p. 12)