Reviews for Salon de belleza (Beauty Salon)

The average rating for Salon de belleza (Beauty Salon) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-08 00:00:00 Moises Fajardo 'The best thing was a quick death under the most comfortable circumstances' Everyone suffers and everyone must eventually die, the rich and poor alike. Yet, it is the poor, the discarded, those on the fringes of society'be it by choice or cast off for being deemed as an illness to society'that must suffer and die in pitiful conditions and solitude, often forgotten by those around them or ignored by the multitude of marching feet that pound the pavement just away beyond where they lie dying in a gutter. Beauty Salon, Mario Bellatín's powerful book that at 63 pages hugs the border between being a succinct novella or short story, is a emotionally jarring account of a young man converting his beauty parlor into a shelter for men to spend their final days as their body is ravaged by an unnamed plague which is gutting the city. 'It wasn't death that got me,' he says, 'the only thing I wanted was to make sure these people, abandoned by state hospitals, didn't die like dogs in the middle of the street.' Heart wrenching and brutally honest, Bellatín illuminates his miniscule allegory through impressively layered symbols as he weaves the life story of a man who must become caretaker for the dying with the pains and plight of a his community as it is faced with bigotry and burdened by the AIDs epidemic. Beauty Salon is like an elaborate tango between life and destruction, elegantly dancing back and forth across the plotline as if it were a dance floor and flourishing each step with his mutli-layered symbolism. The story never really leaves the dance floor to progress into the untold futures of the night, but deftly swirls and steps across each inch of the narrator's life to pull it all together as one moment of artistic beauty. Having been rejected by his mother 'for not turning out to be the straight son she had wanted,' he moves to the city a follows the advice of a former employer 'that I should never forget that youth is fleeting and that I should take advantage of my young age as much as possible.' He opens up a highly successful beauty salon and lives an exhausting nightlife chasing other young men at clubs and steambaths, until the plague begins to claim the lives of those close to him. Narrated by looping through past and present, his narration may be considered to be a symptom of the disease which leaves many of the young men to lie awake ranting aimlessly, yet the technique is a brilliant method for Bellatín to control that what he reveals is done at just the precise moment. This tiny novella is so carefully crafted and emits a poetic radiance through its swirling, short sentence structure. 'Despite the circumstances, I feel a somewhat sad joy when I realize that for the first time ever I've imposed a certain kind of order on my life, even if the way I have achieved it does seem a bit gloomy.' Bellatín constructs a poignant account of his community and the undeserved slighting it often receives. His nightlife is full of dangers from others, such as a gang that attacks men like him who dress as women and these victims that survive the sporadic violence are subjected to further suffering as they are subsequently shunned by the general population. The narrator is at home with the underbelly of society, with the dregs and the outcasts, and feels he must offer aid where nobody else will. Many of the first who come to die in The Terminal are rejected by society and denied medical assistance from religious organizations simply for being whom they are, and barred from hospitals for not meeting the proper economic status. Nothing is ever named, not the narrator, those awaiting the end in The Terminal, or even the plague, which only intensifies the essence of being an outcast, denied even a name in the eyes of the ideals of society. Although the plague is never named, there is a strong implication of being the AIDs epidemic. Central to the story are the fish raised by the narrator in the beauty salon, and one of their many purposes to the narrative is to exemplify the nature of the plague as in his depiction of the vicious axolotl fish. [T]hey were so ferocious and carnivorous that they wouldn't put up with the presence of garbage fish, not even for a moment. I once put in a couple of garbage fish while the axolotls were sleeping I stayed for a few moments to watch their reaction. Nothing much happened during the first half hour. The garbage fish got to work, and with their big mouths stuck to the glass they started to eat the impurities in the fish tank….As soon as I left the tank, though, the axolotls attacked and devoured the garbage fish. I returned a few minutes later to discover the carnage. While the garbage fish try to keep the tank clean, similar to the white blood cells, the axototls destroy them and condemn the tank to a slow death. There is a sense of hopelessness that permeates Beauty Salon as the narrator recognizes that no amount of care can ever cure the infected and that all he can do is ease their suffering as their body deteriorates towards an inevitable death. He remains indifferent to them, careful not to get attached, painfully resigned to their expiration date. He allows no sense of hope, discourages encouragement when symptoms temporarily subside, and bans any religious prayer or icons. He belongs to a community outcast by religious institutions, and the totality of destruction wrought upon those touched by the plague could easily lead one to feel they are outcast by a creator. There is little light to cling to in the story, and the little there is dims with each turning page as the reader witnesses the narrators dive into sorrow and solitude, resigned to his own painful demise. Perhaps this is the feeling my mother had when, after years of being examined in hospitals, she was told that she had a malignant tumor…She sent me a letter I never answered. Now that I find myself in a similar situation, there's no one I can write. There's not even anyone out there who doesn't want to write to me. The fish are rather pivotal to the story, reflecting all aspects of humanity in the novella. The narrator first keeps only guppies, a fish he is told are very resilient and require little care'resiliency being a desirable trait in the eyes of someone who leads a exhausting and dangerous life. As the salon begins to fill with the effluvium of the dying, the fish become his last grip on the old world, being an extension of his attempts to adorn himself in beauty and life. It is when the reader begins to view the fish as people themselves when the real dark beauty of the novella surfaces. We all float along at the whim of a world we cannot understand or control, like the fish subjected to the neglect of their weary owner. They suffer from poor living conditions and fungus claims the lives of many, much like the plague. When he puts the fish on the nightstand of a dying young man, they give him comfort, like the comfort the dying find being able to spend their last days in the company of their peers. However, eventually nobody even mentions the fish. They lurk behind cloudy green glass, forgotten by those who should care for them and watch over them. Tiny, yet filled with a melancholy power that echoes deep into the heart, Bellatín's Beauty Salon is a poetic revealing of the hardships faced by those around us, especially those that must live with the faces many avert their eyes from. This is the sort of book that makes you want to run out and hug everyone you know and live your life as a better person, the sort of book that makes you thankfully cling to your health in the present and makes your heart ache for those less fortunate than you as you contemplate ways you could ease the ocean of suffering in the world, even if only by one tiny drop. Similar to Camus' The Plague (well, substituting fascism for AIDs), yet as a tiny glass miniature that captures a tiny beam of poetic light and casts it upon the wall as a giant radiant rainbow. Gritty, emotionally impacting, and downright heartbreaking, this novella makes me hope that the English reading world will soon be treated to more translations of this author that has made quite a mark on the Mexican literary scene. 3.75/5 'Now the only thing I ask is that they respect the loneliness to come.' 'To me literature is a game, a search for ways to break through borders. But in my work the rules of the game are always obvious, the guts are exposed, and you can see what is being cooked up.' - Mario Bellatín

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-03 00:00:00 Larry Dian Briefly: A weighty novella with images that will linger of a transvestite beautician whose beauty parlor transitions from its intended function of the enhancement of appearance to that of the Terminal (the only proper noun used in the novel)'a place where those who suffer from an incurable, fatal, unnamed disease come to die. The operator's attempt to make his parlor more beautiful, more interesting by incorporating numerous aquariums full of colorful fish, foreshadows the inevitable in a tale that feels as if Saramago met Pedro Lemebel. No city is ever named, no disease identified, no people called by name'a vast, tragic wasteland of isolation, compassion, dismal inevitability. Not for everyone, but it should be. This title came to my attention through an article: Top 100 Novels of The Spanish Language in the Last 25 Years, which must have been printed around 1982 or so. ()