Translation Rights TQE / March Fire

Eduardo Mendicutti had a wonderful surprise saved up for us, one of the best that any editor may hope for: the unexpected remittance of the manuscript Fuego de marzo (March Fire), a splendid book of short stories which reads like a novel because each story is progressively brought to life by the same anonymous narrator in chronological development, and because the reader, having finished the book, will have unravelled a moving evocation of puberty.

The surprising, almost unprecedented element of these stories is that, although conceived over almost twenty years (1976-1995), they manage to form an astonishingly coherent narrative. In fact, although each story has its own rhythm and treatment, characters, places, words, and situations recur in each of them like choruses sprouting from the memory of youth, mutually explaining and enriching one another.

Fuego de marzo tells of the experiences of a child between the ages of ten and thirteen who, guided by his inquisitive gaze, leads us through the memory of his discoveries. The discovery of a way of being and feeling; the discovery of differences be they social, emotional, erotic, esthetic, familiar, racial or vital; in short, the discovery of the burns caused by a time as “terrible and pious as the fire of March”.

Some may relate these stories to El palomo cojo (TheLlimping Pigeon), a novel by Mendicutti which we published in 1991 and which has now been made into a film by Jaime de Armiñán. But just as in the novel, the claustrophobic setting favours the child’s introspective monologue. Fuego de marzo is set in exteriors and the voice of the child-adolescent is changeable and multiple, as if impregnated with the fears which the very experiences of life have caused in him.

Eduardo Mendicutti was born in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz) in 1948.  In 1972 he moved to Madrid where he obtained a degree in Journalism and where he has lived ever since. He has won prizes such as the Café de Gijón and Sésamo.  He has published over ten works, all of them enthusiastically received by critics and public alike, and which have been translated into different languages.  Two of his novels, El palomo cojo and Los novios búlgaros, have been brought to the big screen, the first directed by Jaime de Armiñán and the second by Eloy de la Iglesia. His novel El ángel descuidado won the Critics’ Prize in Andalucía in 2002.