“A masterpiece . . . Betrayed by Rita Hayworth is a triumph . . . Puig does camp it up in a fabulous way, full of literary allure, magnetic glower, smoldering good looks and plenty of plain panache and strut . . . A screamingly funny book . . . His characters turn out to be contemporary proto-Bovarys and proto-Quixotes, all pouring their heart out in prose you haven't seen since last leafing through a pulp movie magazine or True Romances. En fin, a dazzling and wholly original debut by Senor Puig, who obviously loves us madly; and a hand too for the translator, Suzanne Jill Levine, whose transfigurations of infantile Americanese deserve all praise.

– Alexander Coleman, New York Times Book Review

"An intimate look at the maids, stifled housewives, and would-be gangsters living on the outskirts of Buenos Aires during the country’s period of political transformation from 1933 to 1948 . . . Luminous . . . A pop art classic."

– Publishers Weekly

"For many people—and certainly for Puig as a boy in small-town Argentina—the first and most absorbing form of storytelling is gossip: tales (almost always told by women) about romances and breakups, scandals and humiliations. There is an endless fascination in parsing other people’s lives, comparing them to ours, rendering judgment and imagining how our own lives might be judged. In Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Puig captures the human inclination to peer and weigh and compare, while taking advantage of that same inclination in his readers . . . [It is] perhaps his most lyrical novel."

– Natasha Wimmer, The Nation

“An insidiously successful portrait of minds marking time . . . scrupulously faithful to its theme of mental desolation: distant enough from it to ensure near-perfect stylistic control; but close enough, in spite of all the parody, to lock us firmly into these scenes from the provincial mind.”

– Michael Wood, New York Review of Books

“David Foster Wallace once wrote that Manuel Puig ‘could make dialogue do anything.’ In his debut novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Puig writes about a small Argentinian town in the 1930s and ’40s: its secrets, its gossip, its scandals . . . Puig takes you eavesdropping through this small town, beginning with a whirlwind of unattributed dialogue."

– Kathleen Creedon, Vanity Fair