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.

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextRequest in advance PQ7298.12.E4 S2513 2009Off-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