We are scolded in today’s New York Times for not caring enough about the work of Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. Here’s a brief description of the plot of the Bellatin novella Beauty Salon:

In an unnamed city that is suffering from an unnamed epidemic a transvestite hairdresser has turned his shop into a hospice for men dying of the disease, caring for them as indifferently as he tends to the fish he houses in aquariums that are his sole diversion.

Much of Mr. Bellatin’s work focuses on “characters whose bodies are deformed, disfigured or diseased or whose sexual identity is uncertain or fluid.”  I can’t wait to crack this stuff open. Incidentally, Bellatin is missing part of his right arm due to a birth defect, a fact which apparently justifies a new literary genre, “literature of the wound.” Critic Francisco Goldman is quoted: “In Mario’s sense, the wound is literal and comes with all kinds of psychological nuance and pain, and seems related to sexuality and desire, the desire for a whole body. One of my favorite aspects of him is this sense that he is writing for all the freaks — either literally freaks or privately and metaphorically, that he really touches us.”

Contemporary literature is one unending freak show. Or maybe it’s not. It’s normal people who are the true freaks today. If you were missing an arm, would your desire for a new limb be sexual? 

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