In three separate autobiographies, celebrated Mexican innovator Mario Bellatin recounts his childhood trauma as a bathhouse spectacle, the treatment of an illness suffered by his Sufi spiritual mentor, and his complicated search for a quality second-hand Renault 5.
Bellatin has already delivered a laugh-out-loud satirical biography of a reclusive (and fictional) Japanese author with 2013's novel, Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction. Reversing the gaze, Bellatin now examines perhaps his most complicated, and least reliable, subject: himself.
Like the Duchamp sculpture from which it takes its name, Mario Bellatin’s The Large Glass deconstructs the very form it embraces, revealing the artifice of the autobiographical genre, while celebrating - with wit and raunchy humor - the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves. Another entry in English that further solidifies Mario Bellatin as one of Latin America's most important living writers.
Bellatin has already delivered a laugh-out-loud satirical biography of a reclusive (and fictional) Japanese author with 2013's novel, Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction. Reversing the gaze, Bellatin now examines perhaps his most complicated, and least reliable, subject: himself.
Like the Duchamp sculpture from which it takes its name, Mario Bellatin’s The Large Glass deconstructs the very form it embraces, revealing the artifice of the autobiographical genre, while celebrating - with wit and raunchy humor - the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves. Another entry in English that further solidifies Mario Bellatin as one of Latin America's most important living writers.
