Toolbox (review)

Egypt-born Mexican writer Fabio Morábito would like to be in the same bunch as Nicholson Baker. Much like Baker’s in The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Morábito’s literary experiments are obsessively minimalist. They focus on the abstruse and the insignificant and describe “slices of life” in the most philosophical terms, forcing us, when they succeed, to see life and literature anew. In Toolbox, Morábito’s first book translated into English—he is also author of Empty Lots, which won the Carlos Pellicer Prize—he attempts to thrust on us a different understanding of the knife, the screw, the scissors, and other mechanical instruments we tend to pay attention to only in their most functional aspects. The result is often charming but never fully successful. The reason is undeniable: Morábito’s language is loose, abstract, and obnoxiously imprecise. More often than not he fails to enlighten the reader because he himself gets lost. Every hammer blow, for instance, is “a flowing lava of voices that has been reduced to one sole syllable. Every hammer blow raises to the surface our lower depths, which are often close to the petrified inertia, their connections to the here-and-now shrunk to a few dreams, a few prangs of conscience.” The meaning of the sentence is difficult to grasp, perhaps even to its author.