A review by millibear
Betrayed by Rita Hayworth by Manuel Puig

emotional reflective medium-paced

CW:

There's some brutal descriptions of children being raped by high-school boys in some later chapters. They're brief, but vivid.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Child abuse and Rape

What a strange book! "Betrayed by Rita Hayworth" is, like, all dialogue, in a sense. Chapters can be overlapping conversations flying over the head of a child, one-sided gossip fests with a friend, long and rambling stream of consciousness babbling from a grade-schooler, vitriolic letters from high-schoolers, lonesome diary entries... Not much standard sentence spacing or punctuation in parts, but it drives home that characters are speaking from their hearts and pouring things out. The sense of time and place is strong, even without any third-person-objective descriptions of surroundings. Very cool. "Betrayed by Rita Hayworth" follows the family and friends of a young child named Toto as he grows up in Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s. It's more vibes than plot, but worth reading just to see what Puig does with conversations. I can't speak to the original Spanish text, but Jill Levine's translation into English is really pleasant to read.