Manuel Puig is a Marxist and the United States is, after all, the major stronghold of world capitalism, its inhabitants stupefied and/or morally decayed, the rich by too much and the poor by too little; everyone is a victim in some sense. Still, Puig is also a Freudian. He knows—as the protagonist [of Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages], a 74-year-old Argentine expatriate named Juan José Ramirez, tells his interlocutor, 36-year-old Larry John—that "There's a particular danger involved in Marxism, for young people. Aside from the moral coherence and the voice it gives to so many feelings and sentiments. It's such a total critique of society, and the mission it sets itself so overshadows other concerns that young people who embrace Marxism often find within it their means to deny the necessity for any further exploration of their own psyche."

The conflict between Marx's theory of alienation and Freud's incessant probing of our psyche motivates and gives life to this brilliant tour de force….

The narrative is told entirely in dialogue between the two men. Not until the very end, the dénouement, is the story carried by a series of letters. Ramirez, an invalid with a fragile heart and high blood pressure, lives in a home for the aged and the sick. Several times a week he is wheeled about Greenwich Village by Larry John, born Giovanagelo, an impoverished, unemployed history professor. (p. 19)

The two men probe each other's past like duelists—parrying, lunging, seeking out the vulnerable center. (To make a point? To delve into a mystery that will make life a little easier once it is revealed?) Their battle is at times heart-rending, at other times frustrating. They catch each other in lies, in harsh truths; they are guileful, they are ferociously candid, they are soon enmeshed in fantasies, conspiring in their invention.

All this lays bare the struggles in their lives, in the lives of their families—husband and wife, mother and son, father and son, worker and employer. Fiction or truth? We don't know. It doesn't matter. Fiction exposes truth—and truth fabricates a curtain to hide behind. Ramirez and Larry are metaphorically father and son. Sometimes they are interchangeable. We have to backtrack on the unfolding dialogue to remind ourselves who is speaking. It is confusing—deliberately so. Again, it doesn't matter. Our inner and external lives are being scrutinized, suddenly spotlighted, just as suddenly enveloped in darkness.

Larry tells us about his sometimes violent father—whose brutality explodes spasmodically from a silent passivity—about his loving mother, and about his Oedipal desires, soon translated into various (not many) amorous adventures. Sex is withheld, given, thwarted, passionate. Ramirez, the aged amnesiac, now becomes a voyeur, constantly pushing at Larry to reveal more and more explicitly his sexual desires for his mother and his intimacies in his sundry affairs with young women.

From Ramirez we discover little. He was a political dissident in Argentina, led a general strike, was imprisoned, tortured, finally released and permitted to leave his country under the auspices of the human rights organization that subsidizes him. He had a wife and a son, both of whom were murdered by the Argentine authorities—or have they disappeared, or did they never exist? He has a rich brother, he says, who gave money for his own release from prison. He ignored his wife and child in the past because of his commitment to the fight for trade union independence—or is that also fantasy? The old man's fantasy or Larry's? (pp. 19-20)

By the time we reach the concluding exchange of letters, we realize that we have been through a series of psychoanalytic forays (I hesitate to use the word sessions) between the old man and the younger one—that each is responsible for his own trauma, his own neuroses, yet also that both are casualties of history.

Whether one accepts Freud's Oedipal theory or Marx's theory of alienation is of course up to the reader. Puig is an artist, though, and his portrait of two men grappling with their suffering is exceedingly moving and brilliantly done. Strangely, the more space I put between the book and myself, the more tragic I find it. It sticks to the mind. Like one cursed, I cannot find peace, cannot escape from its pain. (p. 20)