Contigo a la distancia. Manuel Puig en los diarios de Carmencita

Contigo a la distancia. Manuel Puig en los diarios de Carmencita

Novel , 2017

Planeta Argentina

Pages: 192

It’s 1940. Manuel Puig, eight, and Carmen Acuña, fourteen, meet at the General Villegas cinema and become close friends. When Puig leaves the town they begin to write to each other. They will never stop doing it until the famous writer dies unexpectedly in Cuernavaca, Mexico. As the years go by, Carmencita -as Puig nicknames her- gathers the letters together into his personal journals and rewrites, with surprising tenderness and beauty, the friendship story that united them for more than half a century. The exquisite narration, the deep sensitivity and originality of the style that the author unfolds allows to discover a new and unknown Manuel Puig, with the ghosts, obsessions and fears that hounded him, and with the incurable solitude that haunted him even during the splendour of his international fame. Next to Puig we find the extraordinary Carmencita, a country woman, intelligent and sensitive, a voracious reader and cinephile, who throughout her life had to face dramatic and painful moments in a country that is built to the blows and startles.

Contigo a la distancia is the fascinating story of two souls united beyond time and distance, and also beyond their differences and contrasts. Carlos Balmaceda shows us the purest and bright side of two lives shaken by a society full of political, ideological and sexual prejudices, intolerance and authoritarianism. A deeply current novel that at the same time is an exciting reflection on how art, even in the midst of greater adversity, can change our lives.

'Dos seres marginales que se contaron la vida', La Prensa, 19/11/2017