Home Reading Service: A Novel

After an accident—or “the misfortune,” as his cancer-ridden father’s caretaker, Celeste, calls it—Eduardo is sentenced to a year of community service reading to the elderly & disabled. Stripped of his driver’s license & feeling impotent as he nears 35, he leads a dull, lonely life, chatting occasionally with the waitresses of a local restaurant or walking the streets of Cuernavaca. Once a quiet town known for its lush gardens & swimming pools, the “City of Eternal Spring” is now plagued by robberies, kidnappings, & the other myriad forms of violence bred by drug trafficking. 

At first, Eduardo seems unable to connect. He movingly reads the words of Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, & more, but doesn’t truly understand them. His eccentric listeners—including 2 brothers, 1 mute, who moves his lips while the other acts as ventriloquist; deaf parents raising children they don’t know are hearing; & a beautiful, wheelchair-bound mezzo soprano—sense his detachment. Then Eduardo comes across a poem his father had copied by the Mexican poet Isabel Fraire, & it affects him as no literature has before. 

Through these fascinating characters, like the practical, quick-witted Celeste, who intuitively grasps poetry even though she never learned to read, Fabio Morábito shows how art can help us rediscover meaning in a corrupt, unequal society.

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Fabio Morábito was born in Egypt to an Italian family. When he was 15, his family relocated from Milan to Mexico City, & he has written all his work in Spanish ever since. He has published 5 books of poetry, 5 short-story collections, 1 book of essays, & 2 novels, & has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the 20th century, including Eugenio Montale & Patrizia Cavalli. Morábito has been awarded numerous prizes,…