Whenever Puig is asked about literary influences, he denies that he comes from any literary tradition, insists that he does not read much fiction, admits to having casually leafed through Ulysses (1922), and claims that the greatest influence on his work was an extraliterary one: the cinema. However, his use of cinematic techniques together with other aspects of his style make his work most closely resemble the French new novel. The new novelists, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes, imitate the cinema by presenting sharp visual images and by recreating "things" in all their concrete real ity. Often, this amounts to a cataloguing of external objects as can be seen repeatedly in Heartbreak Tango, 1969 ("On the wall opposite the bed a window, on one side of it a mantelpiece laden with dolls, all with natural hair and movable eyes, and on the other side a bureau...