Synopsis
"Like much of Mr. Bellatin’s work, Beauty Salon is pithy, allegorical and profoundly disturbing, with a plot that evokes The Plague by Camus or Blindness by José Saramago."--New York Times
"Including a few details that may linger uncomfortably with the reader for a long time, this is contemporary naturalism as disturbing as it gets."--Booklist
A strange plague appears in a large city. Rejected by family and friends, some of the sick have nowhere to finish out their days until a hair stylist decides to offer refuge. He ends up converting his beauty shop, which he’s filled with tanks of exotic fish, into a sort of medieval hospice. As his “guests” continue to arrive and to die, his isolation becomes more and more complete in this dream-hazy parable by one of Mexico’s cutting-edge literary stars.
Mario Bellatin, the author of numerous short novels, was born in Mexico City in 1960. In 2000, Beauty Salon was nominated for the Médicis Prize for best novel translated into French. This is its first translation into English.
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About the Author
Mario Bellatín was born in Mexico City in 1960 and studied film in Cuba. A singular talent and risk-taking storyteller, Bellatín is the author of the short novels, Canon perpetuo, Efecto invernadero, Damas chinas, and Poeta ciego. Salon de belleza (Beauty Salon) was released in 1999 and received huge praise and wide recognition. This is its first translation Originally from NYC, Hollander has lived in Mexico City for the last 20 years. Editor of magazines: The Portable Lower East Side (1983-1993) and Poliester (1992-2000). Author of various works of fiction, translator, writer, director and producerof the feature film Carambola (2005). He currently writes for the London Guardian Weekly and the New York Times travel section.
Reviews
An extremely slender, sad tale by Bellatín recounts a gay man's reflections on the waning days of sexual excess and the specter of death wrought by AIDS, though here AIDS is a mysterious, nameless plague. Formerly a stylist in a beauty salon in an unnamed city, the narrator, a transvestite, has now transformed the salon into the Terminal, where people who have nowhere to die end their days. The Terminal has become a kind of hospice for dying gay men, the hair dryers and armchairs sold to buy cots and a cooker, the mirrors removed to avoid multiplying the suffering. The manager keeps exotic fish in aquariums, which he keenly observes as an allegory of what's happening in the larger world: as symptoms of the sickness become apparent on his own body, he notices a fungus growing on the angelfish that fatally infects the others. The narrator's brutal reasoning renders Bellatín's tale an unflinching allegory on death. (Aug.)
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Beauty Salon
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ISBN 10: 0872864731
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ISBN 13: 9780872864733
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