Home Reading Service
A Novel
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Publisher Description
In this poignant novel, a man guilty of a minor offense finds purpose unexpectedly by way of his punishment—reading to others.
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 and disabled. Stripped of his driver’s license and feeling impotent as he nears thirty-five, 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 and swimming pools, the “City of Eternal Spring” is now plagued by robberies, kidnappings, and 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, and more, but doesn’t truly understand them. His eccentric listeners—including two brothers, one mute, who moves his lips while the other acts as ventriloquist; deaf parents raising children they don’t know are hearing; and 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, and 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
