Book Review

“Landing on the Moon,” the third story of Pablo Morábito’s newly translated collection The Shadow of the Mammoth, begins with eight of its nine characters falling asleep. The one remaining, young Fabricio, is instructed to wake everyone up when it’s time for Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon. The story happens in the leadup to this event: Fabricio’s abuela wakes up and calls him over. She instructs him to steal money from relatives purses and wallets. He refuses.  “Do you want me to die right now?” she responds. This continues until he has taken from everyone in the room. In the end, he misses the moon landing.

Like the best stories in the collection, the ending of “Landing on the Moon” leaves the reader both informed and bewildered. Fabricio’s response to his abuela makes sense but her demands do not. She doesn’t even seem to want the money, instead asking Fabricio to hold onto it for her. In the end she dies, closing off any possibility of explanation and leaving her grandson slightly more corrupted.

This is the beauty of Morábito’s best stories: You can look forever and never quite figure them out. The emptiness around abuela’s motivation, and indeed Morábito’s comfort and ability to write interactions with characters whose central motivations escape understanding, pulls the reader in like a black hole or an abyss.

In a similar vein, the next story, “Artemis and the Stag,” centers on a piccolo player who travels the world playing a single note. The note in question comes at the end of a three-hour long symphony and marks the final, killing blow of Artemis’s arrow on the stag. Wildly praised by audiences and conductors, the musician obsesses over a slight difference between the intended note and the sound produced by the piccolo.

At first, this obsession, and the role itself, feels like the preoccupation of an artist trapped in a limited, somewhat degrading role. But as the story progresses, Morábito expertly shifts and deepens the reader’s sense of the note. By the end, the task of playing it feels impossible. The note is “the last link that binds us to Greece.” Likewise, the piccolo player’s job is one “demanding total adherence from the piccolo player to every note in the composition.”

The Shadow of the Mammoth is the second collection of Morábito’s short stories translated into English and released by Other Press, who also issued a translation of his novel Home Reading Service in 2021. Born in 1955, Morábito has published numerous story collections, books of poetry, and novels. He has also translated Italian poetry into Spanish.

In a 2022 interview with Latin American Literature Today, Morábito speaks to how his work as a poet influences his novels and short stories. He describes his “fondness for short stories, which thanks to their brevity can be written almost as poems are written.” In his view, this means starting from a general situation and seeing how it emerges. He goes on to add that, in situations where he has gone in with more of a plan, he has felt constrained, “without freedom of movement.”

Morábito’s best stories are wide open. You leave wondering, thinking. Morábito achieves this effect in stories that are concise and claustrophobic. “Landing on the Moon,” for example, takes place between a crowded living room and kitchen. “Artemis and the Stag” unfurls in hotel rooms and hired cars.

Morábito is concerned with the space and structure underlying things. In the collection’s first story, “The Nail in the Wall,” the narrator comes to believe that the nail put in place to hang a painting is a greater work of art than the painting itself. He finds that the nail offers “a connection to the cosmos.” Adding: “Every house should have that, a connection to the cosmos, some way out of these walls, the walls that protect you, yes, but they also suffocate you.”

These moments speak to his background as a poet. If poetry is concerned with revealing the structure underlying language, Morábito’s fiction echoes this goal in its focus on the structures underlying life. The stories in The Shadow of the Mammoth are constantly revealing the hidden scaffolding that holds up our world: grass at airports that keeps them functional, underground tunnels through which wildlife migrate, the nail in the wall.

Likewise, they reveal the capacity of language to provoke joy and wonder. In the title story, which structurally calls to mind a combination of Cortazar’s “All Fires the Fire” and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” a character finds himself conscripted as the running companion of a blind man. Attached at the wrist, he feels “an animal like feeling of plenitude that would linger in his bones for several hours.” But where “Cathedral” ends with a single moment of wonder, Morábito’s asks for more. After his first companion leaves, the narrator hunts for a year until he finds a second blind man to accompany.