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280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
When you’ve no choice but to stay in one place, you build up incredible mental agility. You can stretch out in the present as much as you like, or dizzily pitch yourself into the future, or you can slide into reverse: that’s dangerous, though, because it’s where your memories are, all of them: the good, the insignificant and the downright horrible.
In love, there are no ridiculous, absurd or obscene postures. Without love everything is ridiculous and kitsch and obscene. Such is the case with rules, with traditions.
"Nunca imagine que el estar feliz incluyera tanta tristeza."
"Los tangos son unas músicas tristes que se bailan cuando uno está alegre y así vuelve a ponerse triste."
i feel happy, and yet i'm not happy. i never imagined that to feel happy would contain so much sadness.no less than six different publishers have brought mario benedetti's work (novels, short stories, poetry, drama) into english translation, yet the late uruguayan author still has not found even a fraction of the stateside audience (nor acclaim) his writing so clearly deserves. published in its original spanish in 1982, years after benedetti himself was forced to flee his homeland, springtime in a broken mirror (primavera con una esquina rota) is a polyphonic novel of political and personal exile.
human beings are strange creatures when condemned to their own solitude, or when punishment consists in bringing them face to face with the loneliness of one, two or three of their fellows, when none of them ever chose to be in such close proximity. i don't believe (not even after these recent harsh years) what that gloomy existentialist said about hell being other people, but i will admit that often other people are not exactly heaven.benedetti wrote with an abundant humanity, with a generosity of spirit and a resounding empathy. springtime in a broken mirror is an arresting novel laying bare the ongoing toll of political strife on families and loved ones. benedetti's characters struggle with loss and longing, each tortured in their own way and bearing the residual scars of national turmoil and its inevitably messy aftermath.
obviously, once this is over, when it's all done with and you become conscious of having survived it all, you must be left with a crumb of dignity, but also a permanent deposit of rancour. which will never go away, even if the future brings you security, trust, love and a safe path forward. a deposit of rancour that can rot and spread and even contaminate that trust and love, that onward path, all of which could intertwine with more than one individual future. in other words, those ruthless jailers, those experts in cruelty, those loathsome cannibals, those hierophants of the sacred order of the trap, are guilty not only in the present; their guilt will carry far into the future. not only are they responsible for every single iniquity, or for the sum of those iniquities; they are responsible, also, for having undermined the time honoured foundations of a solid society. when they torture a person, kill him or not, they are also tormenting (even though they don't lock them up, even if they just leave them defenceless and bewildered in their ravaged homes) that person's wife, his parents, his children, damaging all of their relationships. when they crush a revolutionary (as in the case of santiago) and force his family into exile, they tear time to shreds; distorting the history of that branch of the tree, that small clan. to regroup in exile is not, as is so often said, to wipe the slate clean, to start the count again from zero. you start from minus four, or minus twenty, or minus a hundred.