Translation Rights TQE / The Careless Angel

Only Eduardo Mendicutti is capable of making us laugh hysterically and, just two pages later, inviting us to look back nostalgically to the delicate innocence of our first love.  El angel descuidado (The Careless Angel) tells of this first experience.  The new novel in which Mendicutti uses all of his narrative art.

In 1965, among the novices of a religious congregation, the very young Brother Rafael and Brother Nicolás live out the luminous and harsh experience of a first love.  Under asphyxiating circumstances, the two adolescents face everyone and everything that seek to separate them: the mysticism of their vocation, the desire to become missionaries, their vow of chastity, the alarmed teacher of the novices…  Without a hint of guilt, they discover, suffer and enjoy that first love, which is never forgotten, although sometimes renounced.  It is thirty five years later that Rafael, having become a popular writer, comes to know where Nicolás ended up, now married and a successful businessman, of whom he had known nothing until then.  Little by little, Rafael understands that Nicolás has tried to block out that memory during his whole life, and that he, on the other hand, remembers it as emotive and fun, since that is the best way to defend it from the passing of time.

In his back-flashes to the past, Rafael pulls the reader into the rigid and bizarre world of the novices, where we can also get a sense of  Spain in the seventies:  the development of tourism, the triumph of  El Cordobés, the visit of the Beatles…

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.