The most encouraging recent arrival on the Latin American literary scene has been that of Manuel Puig. His two novels, La traición de Rita Hayworth (1969) and Boquitas pintadas (1970, Painted Little Mouths) see to express the ethos of the provincial middle classes, an enterprise that has not been successfully attempted before in Latin American writing. His characters are usually rootless sons of immigrants who, for lack of a viable tradition of their own, have relied on what to many may seem a curiously eclectic range of cultural models: the Hollywood film, the local woman's magazine, the radionovela, and the lyrics of the tango and the bolero. Puig expresses the ethos of the so-called cursi, the middle-class parvenu who lives according to the rules of what he imagines to be elegant in order to be thought elegant himself, but who is able only to display a grotesque imitation of the real thing.
Like [Cabrera Infante's] Tres tristes tigres, Puig's novels are very funny while at the same time deploying an underlying pathos: the pathos of having to project a borrowed identity, the pathos of being forced by admen to compete according to arbitrary norms, the pathos of being sensitive and intelligent, like Toto, the young hero of La traición de Rita Hayworth, amidst a disapproving environment concerned only with such 'normal' pursuits as material gain.
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