Home Reading Service

September 6, 2021
Morábito makes his English-language debut with a satisfying fable, at once satiric and soulful, of a literary awakening in Mexico. The middle-aged narrator, Eduardo, lives in Cuernavaca, a “city that had no soul, only swimming pools,” and runs his family’s furniture store, which is being extorted by an organized crime ring. As part of his community service requirement stemming from his role in a car accident, Eduardo agrees to be a “home reader” of literature for people in need. His performances are met with apathy, antipathy, or, in the case of a paralyzed woman with whom he falls in love, enchantment. Eduardo’s sonorous voice earns him a reputation as something of an artist, and after he reads to his clients a sensual poem by a Mexican poet that his cancer-stricken father had copied out by hand, the work starts a poetry craze in the “uncultured” city and reveals a mysterious romance from his father’s past. Morábito sweeps the plot along with both melodramatic and noirish elements—rogue criminals, adulterous affairs, doomed romances—all converging in a “tragic soiree” at a bookstore. Unlike some author readings, this idiosyncratic performance will keep its audience rapt.

October 15, 2021
Poet, essayist, and fiction writer Mor�bito's latest novel arrives stateside with the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, Mexico's highest literary honor. Egypt-born, Italy-raised, Mexico-domiciled since 15, Mor�bito is polyphonic; American poet and professor Curtis Bauer adroitly enables English access here. Literacy, fluency, and interactive engagement with words loom throughout the novel, adding multilayered density to what might initially seem to be a light narrative. Thirtysomething Eduardo lives with his cancer-ridden father and manages the family furniture store in the City of Eternal Spring, Cuernevaca, its former lushness overshadowed by organized crime. He's done something wrong--a never-revealed "accident"--and is sentenced to a year of community service. Because Father Clark knows the mayor personally, Eduardo avoids cleaning toilets, instead reading books, all foreign and in translation, to the elderly and infirm in their homes: Dostoyevsky for the Jim�nez brothers, Verne for three generations of the deaf Vigil family, Dino Buzzati for soporific Colonel Atarriaga, Daphne du Maurier for mezzo-soprano Marg� Benitez, who uses a wheelchair. Exposed for reciting without meaning, Eduardo discovers his father's favorite poet, Mexican Isabel Fraire. Sharing Fraire will save all their (reading) lives.

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