The large glass

the long version

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.