levin reminds me i’m not posting much. thank you, adam.
i haven’t been posting much because i’ve been reading vanity fair, the novel. filling in some gaps because i was more of a continental-type back in the syllabus days. it’s nice but not a life changer. almost done. not gonna write about it.
i read a grip of shorter books in between big chunks of thackeray. one of them was lydia millet’s love in infant monkeys, but i want to think about that one some more and maybe reread some of it before i put my take up. others were crap and i don’t feel like talking about them. but also there was this novella by mario bellatin called beauty salon.
i’m a little jealous of beauty salon, not in the good way (would kill to have written it), but not in a bad way (why did anyone publish this bullshit when i have to bust my ass to get a book out there), either. more like, this is a good little book, beautifully designed, would fit in your pocket except you don’t want to shove it in there because it’s so fancy.
that’s actually a little bit of a problem, because the fanciness is, i assume, part of the reason i had to pay 11 bux for a 64 page book. city lights — didn’t you used to be punk rock? i’d rather have a good read at a good price than uv coating.
anyway, i found out about bellatin from this article in the ny times a couple months back. it did a great job of making it sound like he was some kind of hidden genius of the magnitude of bolano and i was missing out by not reading him and never having heard of him. i was missing out; he is not a genius of the magnitude of bolano.
also, i was distracted by the incredible picture that accompanied the article. apparently the guy is missing a hand and decorates the stump with designer hooks. this comment stands in for a picture.
okay, enough of the flash.
beauty salon is a good book. it’s about a guy who runs a beauty salon and decorates the beauty salon with exotic fish. when not running the beauty salon he and his friends dress up like women and go to the park and turn tricks. then a plague hits the city he lives in and he turns the salon into a hospice for men. it’s told in the first person in the time of the plague, and all of the stuff about hairdressing, fish, and prostitution is reminiscence, except for the fish part — some of the uglier, hardier ones (guppies) manage to hang on throughout.
abstracted this way, the book looks a lot like an allegory for the aids crisis. over the course of its 64 pages it also looks a lot like an allegory for the aids crisis.
“allegory” has become a bad word in recent years, i think. like “fairy tale” without all the whimsy and charm everybody loves.
the strength of beauty salon, i think, is that it is unapologetically allegorical and still very good. part of the reason it’s good is the prose (assuming that kurt hollander’s is a good translation), which is subtle and even blank, but not cold. another part of the reason it’s good is the fact that it has none of that whimsy and charm everybody loves. but the most effective thing about it — what sets it apart from most of the other plague allegories i’ve read — is the perspective. here is a little passage that stuck out, and which i think illustrates what i’m getting at:
In the Terminal they were guaranteed a bed, a bowl of soup, and the company of all the other dying people. If the guest was conscious or, even better, if he was able to move around, he could help out, morally as well as physically. The physical help, truth be told, was very sporadic. That only happened when a guest suffered a sudden, temporary recovery, since I made a point of only accepting those who had almost no life left in them.
the first sentence does a good job of expressing the narrator’s lack of sentimentality (“all of the other dying people” sounds resigned without sounding callous). the “even better” in the second sentence escalates the take, because it isn’t an evaluation of the patient’s quality of life so much as an estimation of his utility to the narrator (and the “morally” is an interesting addition, meant to apply to morale, but signifying uniquely if you do read this as an aids allegory, aids having been one of those diseases that was — and is, i think — treated by some as a moral battleground). (obviously i can’t say whether this pun works en espagnol.) but it’s the phrase “suffered a sudden, temporary recovery” that really clinches for me. sure, it’s another pun (suffer meaning to undergo, but much more commonly to undergo pain, the second meaning being the one that most contemporary readers, i think, would initially take from it) that i can’t be sure was intended by the author (though in this case it would be totally irresponsible of hollander to use it if it wasn’t in the original when so many less loaded terms are available), but it rocked me in english.
so yes, like i said, it’s an allegory, but it’s unsentimental, and that keeps the narrator an enigma. he’s as selfish as he is a “hero,” and the book itself doesn’t judge its teller, which is refreshing.
i would probably be raving about beauty salon if it had cost me between 5 and 7 dollars. i would like to propose that someone start publishing more books like this in a chunky, saddle-stapled chapbook format (similar to that of some philosophy classics i’ve seen). also, city lights, and hell, new directions and everybody else — it’s admirable of you to bring translated works to us rubes, but americans also write books of this length.
hint.
You’re welcome!
That was my first comment on the whole internet, ever. This is my second. The move is to start with two superhot comments, then lay off the gas a little–not too much; just a little–in order to get they’re guard down so as to reallly sock it to ‘em with fuck-you-type finality when they get to my last comment ever. The problem is this: what happns if my second comment ever is also my last comment ever? I’m saying it is.
I feel….funny. I’m gonna go back and insert/delete a couple characters to give the impression of having made typing errors because this whole thing took two minutes to write, not ten.
you are very subtle and powerful at the internet, and i will be watching out for this socking you are planning. it could be the most senseless flame war ever.