Mario Bellatin

Mario Bellatin is one of the most fascinating contemporary Mexican writers and, at the same time, one of the most challenging for the reader. If in part the interest in this writer lies in the textual quality that readers find in his novels, since many of them are comprised of fragments and discontinuous and surprising narrative threads, the challenge for the reader is to discover a literary or aesthetic logic, since through a succinct but precise style, Bellatin manages to create dystopian and unusual scenes and stories. In addition, he makes a clear distinction between “literature” and “writing,” which adds a degree of complexity to his texts, since because of this, reading becomes a theoretical, mental, and experiential exercise. For Bellatin, writing prevails over and overlaps with literature, thus providing his writing with an almost mythical quality, and, by the spiritual aspect that we find in it, also mystical. Likewise, Bellatin not only transcends the literary aspect by emphasizing through his practice that writing is creation and performance, but also, by incorporating spectacular and artistic photographs, produces an appealing aspect of transmediality. Beauty Salon, one of his first novels, has become a cult novel and a symbolic axis through which several of his recurrent themes are connected, that is: transgression of spaces and meanings; mutating bodies; transvestites; homosexuality; but also body politics, pain, and an implicit critique of society in general.