In a public dispute with his publisher, the popular Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin has asked his fans not to buy or read his best-known work. Photo by Luciana Whitaker / LatinContent / Getty

For several months this year, Mario Bellatin, one of Mexico's best-known novelists, waged a quixotic war against Grupo Planeta, the largest publishing group in the Spanish-language world. An eccentric public figure who wears a variety of striking, artist-designed prostheses in lieu of his missing right forearm, Bellatin had an unwavering demand: that Planeta _unpublish _his magnum opus, “Salón de Belleza.”

He conducted most of his one-man campaign through his Facebook page, which has about four thousand followers, many of them writers. In August, he posted a photo of his book’s cover and captioned it with a succinct, unambiguous j’accuse: “Published without authorization and against the explicit will of its author. The Mexican corruption and impunity envelop us all.” He called on his readers not to buy, or even read, the book. He wrote brief, mocking profiles of the senior Mexican editor of Tusquets, the imprint that published “Salón de Belleza,” and the editorial directors at Planeta México, the imprint’s parent company. He called them “the three little pigs.” (He was, he said, given a copy of that book on a visit to the publisher’s offices, instead of the unpaid royalties he’d gone to ask for.) “You are my guardian angels,” he teased. He capped it off with a cryptic series of photographs of Venti-sized cups from Starbucks, on which the name “Tusquets” had been written.

The online tirade shocked the Mexican literary world. “Salón de Belleza” is considered a contemporary classic of Spanish-language literature, and the Tusquets edition was supposed to celebrate, according to Bellatin, the twentieth anniversary of its original publication. (An English translation, “Beauty Salon,” was published by City Lights in 2009.) Instead, the book became the epicenter of a battle that, like one of Bellatin's playful, avant-garde stories,​ put into question not only who owns an artist's work but what such a work even is—and just how good we are at telling the difference between reality and fiction.

Bellatin, who was born in Mexico in 1960, grew up in Peru, his parents’ homeland, and it was there that he began his career, by self-publishing a novel, “Mujeres de Sal” (“Salt Women”), in 1986. In 1995, he returned to Mexico City, where he still lives, sharing an apartment with four dogs in a building not far from the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square. He has published more than thirty books, many of which have been translated into more than a dozen languages. (Six have appeared in English.) Bellatin is usually included in a group of post-boom Latin American writers, such as the Chilean Roberto Bolaño and the Argentine César Aira, who have introduced innovations not only in the style of their prose but in the way they think about literature. In Bellatin’s stories, the line between reality and fiction is blurry; the author himself frequently appears as a character. His books are fragmentary, their atmospheres bizarre, even disturbing. They are full of mutations, fluid sexual identities, mysterious diseases, deformities.

Bellatin wrote the majority of his books with one finger, first on a 1915 Underwood typewriter and later on computers. He has recently upgraded to an iPhone; he writes with a stylus pen, which, he says, has turned him into a much faster writer. His missing forearm and the prostheses that have taken its place are part of his public persona and his art. In 2009, at the International Literary Festival in Paraty, Brazil, for instance, he shocked attendees by climbing onstage wielding, in place of that forearm, a gigantic, shiny aluminum penis. Other prosthetics he has worn over the years include an oversized can opener, a Captain Hook-style hook, and a sculpture resembling the spread legs of a woman. This artificial part of himself not only elicits attention but inspires readers to draw parallels with his work.

When I asked Bellatin about such interpretations, he replied, rather typically, with a story that seemed to fuse fact and fiction. (Bellatin does not like the phone, and insisted that we chat through Facebook.) “I am not missing an arm: this is how I am,” he began, in Spanish. Appearing before other people without a prosthesis, he wrote, “was like being naked, or something like that—maybe wearing pajamas.” For a while he used a sophisticated myoelectric hand, which was operated by “cerebral beats,” but that hand, he said, “made two attempts on my life.” It was also very expensive. Then, on a visit to Varanasi, in India, one of the world’s oldest cities, “during an unforgettable early-morning boat ride, with dead bodies passing us by and enveloped by the stench of the funerary pyres,” he “suddenly decided to remove the myoelectric and throw it into the water so it could follow the path of the dead who are not to be cremated: directly into the hair of the Shiva goddess, who, allegedly, is to be found at that point of the river.” When the Mexican writer Margo Glantz arrived in India, a few days later, and saw Bellatin without his arm, she asked if he had come to the country to become a beggar. After he returned to Mexico, he asked several artists to make prostheses that seemed to them “more appropriate.” “Most of them were quite extravagant,” he explained, “and I gradually recovered my condition of one-armed man in need of no accessory.”

“Salón de Belleza” was published in Lima in 1994 and five years later in the rest of Latin America and Spain. In 2007, in a poll of eighty-one Spanish-language critics, it was ranked nineteenth on a list of the hundred best novels written in Spanish since the 1980s. It “was a cult book that became emblematic,” Graciela Montaldo, a professor of Latin American and Iberian cultures, at Columbia, recalled. It was particularly influential for a new generation of Mexican writers. “We were a group of children trying to write, and he threw his great book on the table,” the award-winning novelist and short story writer Álvaro Enrigue, who teaches at Princeton, told me. “It changed everything in Mexico.”

The short book—it is not quite thirteen thousand words—tells the story of a transvestite hairdresser from a nameless city who is afflicted by an unspecified epidemic and who turns his beauty parlor into a hospice for men dying of the same disease. He tends to these men and cares in vain, also, for his dying fish, swimming in the aquariums that adorn the salon. As the story progresses, many things turn into their opposites: men dress like women; fish die when tended to and survive when ignored; beauty becomes pustules, agony, and death. Bellatin’s work has been compared to the films of David Cronenberg and David Lynch; “Salón de Belleza” was likened to Albert Camus’s “The Plague.” Part of the book’s power stems from its suggestiveness. Is it an allegory about illness as a kind of prison? A modern version of a medieval tale about the plague, with AIDS taking the place of the Black Death? Is it a reflection on beauty and death as the two faces of human life?

“Every reader should reconstruct their own text,” Bellatin has said. Every reader rewrites the story in his own imagination; the author rewrites it, too. Bellatin believes that no literary work can be ever finished—all versions of a novel are equally valid, each reflecting the moment in which they were created.