"I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality"

Puig’s statement links the impulse to create with a fertile incomprehension. Not understanding is not a deficit to be fixed by information; it is an encounter with paradox, contradiction, and emotional residue that resists tidy explanation. The novel becomes an instrument for dwelling in that resistant space. Plot, character, dialogue, and form are ways of turning a knot in the mind and seeing how it holds under pressure. The writer treats experience as an open question, and each scene is a provisional answer.

Such a stance overturns the image of the novelist as the one who already knows. Authority here arises from attention rather than certainty. By acknowledging what eludes grasp, the novelist gives permission to ambiguity and therefore to truth’s layered, unstable nature. Characters are not merely inventions but hypotheses: what would this person do if desire collided with duty, if love met fear, if history pressed on private longing? Through these experiments, reality’s opacity is not dissolved but reframed into patterns that can be felt and tested.

There is an ethical dimension, too. When reality is confusing, the temptation is to simplify, to choose a single story. Fiction resists that contraction. It gathers disparate voices, conflicting memories, and unreliable perceptions, allowing contradictions to coexist without coercing them into a slogan. The novel’s spaciousness makes room for the marginal, the whispered, the dissonant; it treats confusion as an index of complexity rather than failure.

For readers, this approach offers not a handbook but a rehearsal for living. By inhabiting multiple consciousnesses, we practice empathy, tolerating uncertainty without paralysis. The act of writing, and reading, transforms bewilderment into attention, attention into form, and form into a renewed capacity to face the world. Reality remains, still unruly, but after the novel it is more inhabitable: not because it has been solved, but because the mystery has been given contours, rhythm, and the dignity of sustained regard.