If [the] insistent use of unedited dialogue tends to make ["Kiss of the Spider Woman"] read a bit like a radio script …, it is Mr. Puig's fascination with old movies that largely provides its substance and ultimately defines its plot, its shape. What we hear are the voices of two suffering men, alone and often in the dark, but what we see are panther women and zombies, exquisite Nazi heroines and radical racing drivers, exotic settings (a lot of finely perceived detail, especially about fashion) and fabulous metamorphoses, all the iconographic imagery, magic and romance of the movies.

Not that there's anything very innovative about the way this is accomplished. The homosexual is simply an old movie buff who entertains his young, somewhat unimaginative cellmate—especially after lights-out, as a kind of lullaby, and later to get the student's mind off his agony when the police are weakening him with food poisoning—with the plots of fanciful and sentimental old films, seducing him, as it were, with story.

There are five of these films, plus a sixth remembered but (during a lovers' quarrel) not told, and they all touch on the novel's themes of repression and liberation, beauty and (or versus) goodness, strange or unusual women, somnambulism and heroism, love, fear, change and a desire for "Hollywood endings," prefiguring many elements of the novel's plot (the homosexual becomes a kind of tragic film heroine, for example, the student one of the living dead). (p. 15)

But other than these film synopses, there's not much here. A few ambiguous hints about the two men's lives outside of prison …, the footnote lecture on homosexuality and a few radical slogans …, and a laborious seduction in which the seducer is in effect seduced.

The translation by Thomas Colchie, while adequate, seems stiff and hasty, needing a relaxed revision. It fails to capture Mr. Puig's easy colloquial flow, and the voices of the two very different protagonists are not distinguished. (pp. 15, 31)