Mario Bellatin’s novella Beauty Salon is exquisite.  Bellatin has written a lyrical and macabre fable about a man with many sides: female and male, saint and devil, caretaker and leave-taker, connected and utterly disconnected. The man, narrator of the novel, is the proprietor of a beauty salon that has become what he calls “The Terminal“, a sort of hospice for those dying of an unnamed virus.  Bellatin creates an atmosphere that is dream-like (nightmarish at times) and yet securely grounded in firmly-rendered details of personality, place and time.

Bellatin’s narrator puts the reader off-balance from the first page.  He begins with a discussion of his fish tanks, put into the beauty salon as a touch of elegance, something different from the other salons, but 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.“  Caring for the deathly ill but caring aboutthe fish?  His strange mix of callousness and caring appear again and again throughout the book, and each time we are thrown off-kilter and made unsure: is this man a monster or a savior?  We feel both sympathy for him and repulsion as he recounts for us moments from his life, illustrating both his self-reliance and his indulgent (and delusional and dangerous) quests for pleasure and for beauty. The details of how he cares for the invalids in his salon and of his past and present plans are equally unsettling and provoking.  The novella is like a mystery, offering hints and clues of why the narrator behaves as he does; the untangling of the truth engages us, offering us both frustrations and rewards, but in the end, the narrator remains an enigma, a vexing and compelling and unforgettable riddle of a man.

Beauty Salon is a great book, mesmerizing and mysterious.  Bellatin’s narrator,  atmosphere, landscape, and plot are sure to endure in your thoughts long after you’ve finished reading his book.  Kudos to City Lights Books (www.citylightsbooks.com) for bringing out translations of Bellatin’s works for an English-reading audience.