Often the writer's eyes scrutinize reality with the particular desire to find the rarity, the anomaly, the strange. In mediocrity and normality, there are usually no great stories to tell (despite the fact that this "normality" is only a concession to conventions). He who makes his differences ostentatious, any person who exercises his freedom as a deliberate sample of his essence, can be a great literary character.
Eduardo Mendicutti he likes writing and presenting those characters who end up breaking their corsets (never better said considering also the fetishistic aspect of the metaphorical image). Because in the depths of these conventions reside drives as basic as sex and sexuality, with the diversity of representations that it can acquire in each person.
Freeing yourself sexually can be a great step towards other types of liberations that are necessary for personal integrity and that, without a doubt, lead in a better way to happiness and self-realization.
Okay ... "only" it is about novels, the novels of Mendicutti, with their openly homosexual references in universes where that imposed need for restriction is appreciated in the face of everything that supposes wanting above the official currents. But Mendicutti's characters end up exceeding those limits and even, at times, throw an ironic laugh at the reader.
Top 3 best novels by Eduardo Mendicutti
The lame pigeon
The plot has a summer novel point. A kind of retrospective of childhood, of the contrast between the world of a child and the more sophisticated space of adulthood.
But…, (with Mendicutti there are always buts) while we meet the 10-year-old boy, who looks into the lives of these adult characters around a house of his grandparents where he convalesces from a long illness, we discover thanks to the own sensitivity of the child, the peculiarities of the inhabitants of the house, their oddities and eccentricities.
Little by little we consider that in this temporary residence of privileges, luxuries and all kinds of cultural exotics, it can be the perfect space for development to its particular maturity in the making.
The story moves to the middle of the XNUMXth century, where it can be understood that public liberties are kidnapped by the regime.
And yet that house ... the time to abandon innocence is near for the protagonist. His discoveries confront us with a perspective on sexuality and its learning that links with the essence of who we are, that transition between childhood and maturity in which we end up leaving tatters of the soul.
malandar
A singularly paradoxical aspect in the transition to maturity is that feeling that those who accompanied you in a happy time may end up being distant light years from you, your way of thinking or your way of seeing the world.
Much has been written about this paradox. A drastically exemplary case like that of the novel Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, or also Sleepers, by Lorenzo Carcaterra, curiously two novels made into a movie.
It is true that these two stories break that transition of childhood and maturity from the traumatic, but that trauma, that schism in small replicas, I believe that they happen to all of us when we already look at childhood with a certain perspective to see the old sepia image of some of the friends who joined us then.
However, in this novel that inertia towards rupture seems to be faced with a more triumphalist perspective. Friendship can be imposed, despite everything ... Toni and Miguel were good friends from childhood, together with Elena they ended up composing a singular triangle of those with edges and why not say it, also with secrets.
The special place, that refuge of all childhood where the most special ties are tightened is called Malandar, a small universe alien to everything else, where friendship is strengthened with blood, turning the confluence between time and space into a sanctuary.
In Malandar Toni and Miguel dreamed of worlds of 12-year-old children. And it is thanks to Malandar and his symbolism that friendship manages to prolong its sense of eternity despite knowing that each new visit has less time ...
For many more years the two friends will know that they must keep their date, a journey to never forget what they were and what they had, a mysterious visa to the past, their embers and the heat and light that they can still rescue as truly privileged in the simplicity of passing time and living ...
The careless angel
An open and stark song in favor of love, in whatever representation. Nicolás and Rafael discover themselves in the middle of a novitiate, back in 1965, perhaps the worst time to end up convincing you that you are homosexual.
Beyond the social repudiation, in that space even God seems to turn against you. Only ..., when the true faith of what your heart dictates and even the last cell of your body awakens with vehemence, nothing can get ahead, except time ...
Years later Rafael and Nicolás meet again. Why deny what it was? Perhaps by recognizing that you are not what you have traveled on your way, by some kind of resentment. The doubts of that old love of youth awaken with virulence in both lovers.
