Research Catalog
Beauty salon / Mario Bellatín ; translated from the Spanish by Kurt Hollander.
- Title
- Beauty salon / Mario Bellatín ; translated from the Spanish by Kurt Hollander.
- Author
- Bellatin, Mario, 1960-
- Publication
- San Francisco : City Lights Books, 2009.
Items in the Library & Off-site
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1 Item
Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
---|---|---|---|---|
Text | Request in advance | PQ7298.12.E4 S2513 2009 | Off-site |
Details
- Description
- 63 p.; 18 cm.
- Summary
- "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.
- Uniform Title
- Salon de belleza. English
- Alternative Title
- Salon de belleza.
- Subjects
- Genre/Form
- Allegories
- Note
- Translated from the Spanish.
- Processing Action (note)
- committed to retain
- ISBN
- 9780872864733
- 0872864731
- LCCN
- ^^2008036996
- OCLC
- 253837811
- SCSB-12385234
- Owning Institutions
- Harvard Library