Beauty Salon
By: Mario Bellatin.
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: July 1, 2009
Place of publication: San Francisco, USA
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 63
ISBN-13: 9780872864733
Work titles: Salon de belleza.
Description: "An extremely slender, sad tale by Bellatin 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 Bellatin's tale an unflinching allegory on death"--Publisher's weekly, June 29, 2009, p. 109.