The impossibility of reading: memory and traumain Manuel Puig’s Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages

Abstract

In Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, a novel crossed by the tension between the intimate and the political, between memory and trauma, the fictionalization of reading occupies a central place. The novel is structured as a dialogue between two characters, defined by oblivion and frustration, who seek to build, through reading, the meaning of a strange and inaccessible world. The novel narrates the necessity of reading as a way to build a self-narrative against the traumatic experience, while exposing its impossibility.