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 this 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 typical of 12-year-old children. And it is thanks to Malandar and its 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 appointment, a trip never to forget what they were and what they had, a mysterious visa to the past, to its embers and the heat and light that they can still rescue as truly privileged in the simplicity of passing time and living ...
You can now buy the novel malandar, the new book of Eduardo Mendicutti, here: