Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito

Last Friday evening, I started Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, a book I found recently in the Little Free Library near my apartment. (At the same time, I also found a copy of Lolita, which I read some 25 years ago and grabbed anyway because I own nearly every other book by Nabokov and I figured I should round out my collection. I wondered if the two books may have been left there by the same person, at the same time.) I found myself really enjoying it. I was drawn in by the narrator's voice, by a familiar self-loathing heterosexuality and disgust with the physical body. Over the next couple days, I read 150 pages and then on Sunday around 5pm I had to stop reading abruptly as I saw what was about to come (which should have been quite clear to me from the beginning, and yet hadn't stopped me then). Around 2am that night, I woke up feeling anxious about the book and fretted about it for an hour or so before I could fall asleep again. Monday morning, I stared at it on my coffee table. I was only about 80 pages from finishing it, but I couldn't face it. 

Instead I picked up another book from my coffee table, which I had found in that same Little Free Library just two days earlier: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito. I didn't know anything about this book or its author before I found it. It seems not much has been translated into English, but this book was the recipient of Mexico's 2018 Premio Xavier Villarrutia and was released in English* last year. Set in Cuernavaca, the book is narrated by Eduardo who — in the wake of a never-described driving accident — has been mandated to perform community service. A priest friend of his sister's arranges for him to do this in the form of serving as a reader in the homes of the old and infirm. He has five clients: a pair of elderly brothers, a retired military man, a deaf family who read lips, a partly paralyzed aspiring opera singer, and a couple who appear to be in perfect health and of means, so that he has no idea why they've been offered his services. The book follows a trail of funny, unexpected events, intrigues, and tragedies among these characters and others in his life as Eduardo comes to terms with himself. This was a really fun read.

* Here's a fun interview with the book's translator.