Tropical night falls, By Manuel Puig

Authors

  • Alejandra Minelli
  • Alejandra Minelli

Keywords:

Manuel Puig, Melancholy, Absence, Dialogues, Feminine

Abstract

Manuel Puig's "Cae la noche tropical" (Tropical Night Falls), published in 1988 and analyzed by Alejandra Minelli, closes the author's novelistic cycle, exploring themes such as melancholy, absence, and lack from a predominantly female perspective. "Night" is a central metaphor that represents helplessness, introspection, and existential darkness, as well as the decline of life. The main anecdote focuses on the last year of the lives of two octogenarian Argentine sisters, Lucy and Nidia de Angelis, who live alone in Rio de Janeiro, and their interactions with Silvia, a psychologist neighbor, and Ronaldo, a young immigrant.
The novel is divided into twelve chapters, evolving from dialogues between the sisters in the first six chapters to a predominance of letters and written documents in the second half. Nidia, whose name is the opposite of Lucy (light), constructs the narrative of Silvia's story, while Lucy seeks to understand the narrative. The female characters process absence and deprivation through stories of love, cinema, and money. Puig crafts a sentimental discourse about love, old age, and death, using the disappearance of the narrator and the juxtaposition of various written forms to decenter the typical reader of sentimental novels and reaffirm his narrative universe.

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References

PUIG, Manuel. Cae la noche tropical, Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1988.

BARTHES, Roland. Fragmentos de un discurso amoroso, Siglo XXI Editores, México, 1990.

SARLO, Beatriz. El imperio de los sentimientos, Catálogos, Bs As., 1985.

Published

2025-09-08

How to Cite

Minelli, A., & Minelli, A. (2025). Tropical night falls, By Manuel Puig. Language and Literature Magazine, 6(11-12), 73–79. Retrieved from http://170.210.83.53/index.php/letras/article/view/6711

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