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.)
Beauty Salon succeeds in suggesting whole worlds just outside of its pages. The effect is distinctly cinematic: a montage of images which catch the reader's eye and expand the reality of this anonymous man, anonymous disease, and anonymous city far beyond the story itself.
—Larissa Kyzer
In his first work translated into English, Mexican short-novelist Bellatin presents the testimony of a hairstylist who turns his successful big-city salon into a refuge for men dying of an incurable disease. . . . Including a few details that may linger uncomfortably with the reader for a long time, this is contemporary naturalism as disturbing as it gets.
—Ray Olson
Beauty Salon, by Mexican novelist Mario Bellatín, originally published in Spanish in 1999 and now out from City Lights Books in a translation by Kurt Hollander, is short. A mere 63 pages, which is good, because its density requires multiple re-reads-and in that curious inversion of fiction, the less the author says, the more expansive the story's meaning becomes. . . His book itself is a place-contained and at times claustrophobic-like the beauty salon refuge, like the suffocating aquariums. And in it, despite its spare style, lives a dense story that leaves a reader unsettled, and unsettlingly intrigued.
—Shawna Yang Ryan
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. In an unnamed city that is suffering from an unnamed epidemic a transvestite hairdresser has turned his shop into a hospice for men dying of the disease, caring for them as indifferently as he tends to the fish he houses in aquariums that are his sole diversion. Many of Mr. Bellatin's novels, Beauty Salon and Shiki Nagaoka included, focus on characters whose bodies are deformed, disfigured or diseased or whose sexual identity is uncertain or fluid.
That is one reason Ms. Palaversich, who wrote the introduction to a recent Spanish-language compendium of Mr. Bellatin's work, compares him not to other Latin American writers but to filmmakers like David Cronenberg and David Lynch and painters like Frida Kahlo.
—Larry Rohter
Some authors take time creating an overall feel for their book. But when you're writing a novella of well under 100 pages, you don't have much time to set the tone. Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin doesn't waste any establishing the tenor of Beauty Salon. He does it with the first two sentences: 'A few years ago my interest in aquariums led me to decorate by beauty salon with colored fish. Now that the salon has become the Terminal, where people who have nowhere to die end their days, it's been very hard on me to see the fish disappear.' . . . Bellatin's description of the world is blunt and brutal.
—Tom Gebhart
Reading Beauty Salon one is very much in the presence of a man who knows what he believes and tries to consciously put that forth to the reader, and trying to work out just what this is—and why he believe this—constitutes the book's primary interest . . . Beauty Salon is, like the fish tanks described within, a small, closed environment, although the paths that can be taken through it are many.
— Conversational Reading
[This] strange and beautiful parable about human bodies living and dying on the fringes of society . . . prompts us to consider our collective attitudes toward, and treatment of, the human body — in illness, in death, in poverty, and in opposition to dominant conceptions of sexual behavior. . . . [Bellatin provides] a model for dying, and for living; for treating the abject body with honesty and respect, despite its difference and decay — perhaps because of it.
— Words Without Borders
In a sparse style, the short novel Beauty Salon . . . relates the story of a mysterious illness that plagues an unidentified city. . . . The seemingly simple tale offers a complex network of motifs, symbols and paradoxes. The aquariums that adorn the beauty salon, for instance, become the barometer of the advancing plague: like the 'strong young men who had once been beauty queens and then disappear with their bodies destroyed,' the beautiful fish die in the aquariums and are flushed down the toilet. Similarly, once he contracts the plague, the narrator asserts: 'I feel like a fish covered in fungus from whom even its natural predators will flee.' . . . Despite its brevity, Beauty Salon stands to linger in the aquariums of our memories, at times, like the monstrous axolotls, revealing the ugliness of the world, at others, like the mystic golden carp, providing hope for a better tomorrow.
— The Gay and Lesbian Review
"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 Jose Saramago."—New York Times
“What [the narrator] has given to [his patients], and Bellatin to us, is a model for dying, and for living; for treating the abject body with honesty and respect, despite its difference and decay—perhaps because of it.”—Maggie Riggs, Words Without Borders
"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
"An unflinching allegory on death."—Publishers Weekly
"When this disquieting novella appeared, Mexican (and even Latin American) literature changed." —Francisco Goldman
In the Terminal, like the flashy fish that inhabit the aquariums, and the terminally ill that die around them, everything floats. There are no turns of the heart, or sudden twists. We drift through the inevitable. If poetry is making nothing happen, as Auden once said, than this novel shows that prose can as well.
— Bookslut
