On some occasion, when I dreamed of being a writer, I was annoyed by the award of a literary award in which I had participated in a work that seemed infumable to me. It was about not finding the common thread or the action or the magnetism of the characters. A work uprooted from all literary ideas. Or so it seemed to me.
Until later I discovered in many authors that avant-garde attitude that that work in question already exuded then. From Cortázar but also levrero. Nothing better than an awakening to new possibilities for fools to stamp themselves with their own limitations. And then I was a fool, I want to think that I was still young.
All this to start from that recognition towards the experimental of a Mario Bellatin He could very well have been that guy who swept a literary prize that was only attended by fools, upstarts with no future, and even someone else who ended up winning like himself. The thing is that today this author is a great reference for that estrangement necessary in literature to tell stories without stereotypes or subjective conditions of any kind. This is how philosophy is made that starts from the emptying of alienation, from the nausea that erupts in a Pandora's box.
Lucidity without filters. A near world that becomes fabulous to the point of comedy but that addresses essences of the existential that go from love to death, from dehumanization to faith. Bellatín makes literature something more because it also approaches social criticism, uncomfortable scenarios and meaningful dilemmas, in search of a reading sensation of closeness that is more involvement than empathy.
Top 3 recommended books by Mario Bellatín
Beauty salon
A strange epidemic is slowly wiping out the inhabitants of a big city. The dying are disowned by their fellow men, without even a place to go to die. A hairdresser decides to host them in his beauty salon, a space that will become the last refuge for the infected. It does not intend to cure them, only to give them shelter during their last days. There will be no more testimony to such an act of selfless solidarity than the exotic fish that decorate the room inside your aquariums.
Helplessness, pain and death will coexist in that claustrophobic space that will reveal itself, however, as a definitive sample of life in all its fragility. There are premonitory writings because, to tell the truth, you don't have to be Nostradamus to guess that we are precipitating the end. Only when the matter is due to viruses instead of climate catastrophes and everything is narrated before this pandemic ...
«This updated version of Beauty salon -carried out more than twenty years after its first publication- account of a delicate exercise of tightrope walker, where the goal can be understood as writing again so that the original writing remains intact. For me as a creator, the experience carried out under the watchful eye of Mrs. Guillermina Olmedo y Vera was similar to that of restoring an old garden to its splendor. A meticulous clearing work, exhaustive until it almost reaches the invisible, where the new reading achieves that that garden acquires a really intense shade of green, a pleasure accompanied by the penetrating smell of the grass that has just been cut.»
Black ball
Everything takes on another dimension when it is accompanied by ingenious illustrations from someone who is capable of recomposing the imagination with that force of synthesis towards the concept. A good example is this conversion of Bellatín's great story into a succession of images that, rather than presenting us with scenes, chain the narrative as a succession of movements that transform everything into that fourth dimension between conspiring words and images.
A Japanese entomologist who has a peculiar relationship with food (his cousin died of anorexia and his cousin became a prominent sumo wrestler), and whose family is still governed by ancient Japanese precepts, voluntarily decides to stop eating afterwards. Of a strange dream that he has one night From this dream he begins to remember different inexplicable events that began the first time he traveled to Africa. This Bellatin story, adapted by Liniers and by the narrator himself, has a nightmarish and disturbing aroma, which makes it a singular diamond in the world of comics.
Dissected
Who can honestly say that they have never prostrated themselves in front of a mirror and felt that the image it returns to them is that of a stranger? Who can claim that they have never felt like a strange passenger inside their own body or have been horrified when recalling from their memory events that they made themselves but that seemed to obey a logic completely foreign to their own?
That doubling, that small gap between our being, the one that faces the vicissitudes of everyday life, and that self that seems to inhabit a time that is anything but present, is the world in which the two novels that make up this fascinating book take place. Mario Bellatin. In the text that gives the book its title, the narrator observes this autonomous being, but dependent on his existence, which not without a certain hint of doubt he calls My Self?, sitting on the edge of his bed.
Based on this seemingly simple fact, the multiple voices that make up the author alternate narratives through which eccentric characters parade in no less extravagant situations such as a transvestite philosopher, a blind masseur and a child who becomes the greatest expert on canaries in the world. country.
The story that closes the book, The Notary Public Murasaki Shikibu, traced along the same subversive line of multiple metamorphosis (on this occasion it is the writer Margo Glantz who is transfigured the same in the famous Japanese writer Murasaki Shikibu as in an intern de notario), combines places and mystical and mythological beings, such as the Ajanta caves in India or a huge and terrible Golem that plagues the city where the protagonist of the story lives. In the end, we are left with the certainty of what the narrator of Disecado affirms with total conviction: "reality is a pale reflection of any creative act." Especially when the writing event comes from Mario Bellatin, one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
