Bogota And The Beast
At the centre of Colombian author Melba Escobar’s novel, House Of Beauty (her first book to be translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer) is a beauty parlour in Bogota, where Karen works.
She has come to the capital after an unfortunate affair that left her with an illegitimate son. She works long hours at an upmarket beauty salon, run by a stern owner, and sends money to her mother, who looks after the child. She hopes to save enough to get an apartment and bring her son to live with her. She puts up with the snobbery of rich socialites and the unasked for confidences of the unhappy clients, hiding the tips she gets under her mattress. It’s a struggle to survive in the crime-ridden city, in which women—especially non-white-- are exploited with impunity. Karen herself is robbed and raped by her vicious landlord and she cannot do anything; enduring the trauma is preferable to going to the police.
x
One day, a young girl called Sabrina Guzman comes to Karen for a beauty treatment and tells her that she has intimate date with her boyfriend. Later the girl is found brutally murdered, and the cops cover up the crime, calling it suicide by an overdose of drugs. Sabrina’s grief-stricken mother, however, refuses to give up and probes the murder herself, with the help of a private detective. Karen was the last to see Sabrina alive, and knows the name of the man she was going to meet.
The book has a disjointed narrative; Karen’s story is interspersed with the observations of Claire Dalvard, a French woman who grew up in Columbia and returns there after her divorce to practice as a psychoanalyst. She is fascinated by Karen’s skill and her beauty, and nudges her story out of her. Then there is the point of view of Clarie’s friend, the astonishingly subservient Lucia Estrada, who writes popular self-help books and lets her husband publish them under his name.
Karen is lured into prostitution by a workmate, and unwittingly walks into a trap that tightens around her. There is a scam afoot that involves a politician, gangsters and the unfaithful creep who made a fortune from his wife’s writing.
Escobar writes about Columbian society from stifling small town shacks to lavish city mansions, and is quite upfront about the racism, crime and corruption in her country. (The situation is not too different in India). Her descriptions are so vivid that the reader can visualize the rushed, heartless city and smell the stench of packed buses and human degradation, even though the translation is often flat and the dialogue stilted.
Perhaps because Escobar wants to portray the injustice that the poor have to suffer when the rich are in control, the ending is too contrived; still, the book has turned out to be an international bestseller.
House Of Beauty
By Melba Escobar
Published by: 4th Estate
Pages: 256
No comments:
Post a Comment