Culture September 14, 2009

The bleak, rapid-fire sentences of Mexican writer Mario Bellatín’s Beauty Salon give the spare novella an airless hyper-immediacy—and a terrible, unstoppable momentum. When a mysterious and incurable disease devastates an unnamed city, a lone transvestite hairdresser finds himself in the unlikely position of caregiver. Trading in his barber chairs and hair dryers for cots and a kerosene cooker, the nameless narrator converts his salon into the Terminal, a haven where shunned and afflicted young men gather to spend their final days.