Craig Epplin

 Y el eco es anterior a las voces que lo producen.
—Nicanor Parra

The title of Mario Bellatin’s 2008 biography of Frida Kahlo, Las dos Fridas, is unsurprising, obvious even; of all her paintings, Bellatin chooses one whose resonance with his own literature is unmistakable. Unmistakable because everything in his work seems at once doubled and modified, his endless self-portraits mapping a landscape of dissemination. The name Mario Bellatin, or more often mario bellatin, proliferates, attaching fleetingly to any sort of body, young or old, male or female. One of his most recent books, Disecado (2011), follows the model of a Baroque painting (as Federico Zamora aptly puts it), detailing a somnolent encounter between the narrator and a phantasm of himself. The book feels like an expansive fresco of the literary life of the author, … Read More »