Springtime in a Broken Mirror
A Novel
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Springtime in a Broken Mirror
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Narrated by:
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Stacy Gonzalez
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Gary Tiedemann
About this listen
“A wise, lonely novel...[and an] honest reflection of exile.” (The New Yorker)
In the tradition of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, a celebrated classic and heart-wrenching story of a family torn apart by the forces of history, by one of Latin America’s most celebrated writers
The late Mario Benedetti’s work was often ranked with “such esteemed Latin American writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar” (The Washington Post) and his novel The Truce has sold millions of copies around the world. His extraordinary novel Springtime in a Broken Mirror revolves around Santiago, a political prisoner in Uruguay, who was jailed after a brutal military coup that saw many of his comrades flee elsewhere. Santiago, feeling trapped, can do nothing but write letters to his family and try to stay sane.
Far away, his 9-year-old daughter Beatrice wonders at the marvels of 1970s Buenos Aires, but her grandpa and mother - Santiago’s beautiful, careworn wife, Graciela - struggle to adjust to a life in exile.
Published now for the first time in English, Springtime in a Broken Mirror tells with tenderness and fury of the indelible imprint politics leaves on individual lives. Generous and unflinching, it asks whether the broken bonds of family and history can ever truly be mended. Written by one of the masters of the Latin American novel, this is the story of a fractured continent, chronicled through the lives of a single family.
©2018 Fundación Mario Benedetti, c/o Schavelzon Graham Agencia Literaria (P)2020 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Fascinating plot, superb performance, psychological depth
- By Doctor George on 12-05-16
By: Javier Marias, and others
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The Zahir
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Derek Jacobi, Emilia Fox
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 301
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 240
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Story4 out of 5 stars 240
It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought. It ends in obsession. One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared leaving no trace. Though time brings more success and new love, he remains mystified - and increasingly fascinated - by her absence. Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage? The unrest she causes is as strong as the attraction she exerts.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful and deep read!
- By Top 1% Buyer on 09-13-15
By: Paulo Coelho
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Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 154
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 127
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 127
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
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The Collaborator
- By: Diane Armstrong
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 16 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 59
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 48
It is 1944 in Budapest, and the Germans have invaded. Miklos Nagy risks his life and confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps. But no one could have foreseen the consequences.... It is 2005 in Sydney, and Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest and Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Ruined by the reader
- By Hayworth on 02-24-20
By: Diane Armstrong
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Journey to the End of the Night
- By: Louis-Ferdinand Celine
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 338
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 298
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 298
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every minute of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty, and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the public in Europe, and later in America.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Miserable Ride with Cynic Supreme
- By W Perry Hall on 03-15-17
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,168
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,888
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,895
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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4 out of 5 stars
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Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Sophie's Choice
- By: William Styron
- Narrated by: Norman Snow
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 248
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 210
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Story4 out of 5 stars 210
In this brilliant, multi-layered novel, a young Southerner, Stingo, wants to become a writer. In Brooklyn, he meets Nathan, a brilliant Jewish intellectual involved in a turbulent love-hate affair with Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman. She has a terrible wound in her past, one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.
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1 out of 5 stars
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THIS IS ABRIDGED
- By J. Flynn on 07-25-16
By: William Styron
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The Golden Notebook
- By: Doris Lessing
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 27 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 525
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 435
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Story4 out of 5 stars 432
Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political, and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Transcendent narration of a masterpiece.
- By @vmarinelli on 07-03-12
By: Doris Lessing
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The Love Note
- By: Tracy Rees
- Narrated by: Jasmine Blackborow
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 160
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 135
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 133
Perfect for fans of The Keeper of Lost Things and The Villa in Italy. Blue lives a charmed life. From her family's townhouse in Richmond, she lives a life of luxury and couldn't want for anything - well, on the surface at least. Then, on the night of her 21st birthday, her father makes a startling toast: he will give his daughter's hand to whichever man can capture her heart best in the form of a love letter. But Blue has other ideas, and, unwilling to play at her father's bewildering games, she sets out on her own path to find her own destiny....
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Love Note❣️
- By Leslie Gail Mnich on 10-25-20
By: Tracy Rees
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A Suitable Boy (Dramatised)
- By: Vikram Seth
- Narrated by: Ayesha Dharker, Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, full cast
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 348
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 284
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Story4 out of 5 stars 278
A Suitable Boy is Vikram Seth's epic love story set in India. Funny and tragic, with engaging, brilliantly observed characters, it is as close as you can get to Dickens for the twentieth century. The story unfolds through four middle class families: the Mehras, Kappoors, Khans, and Chatterjis. Lata Mehra, a university student, is under pressure from her mother to get married. But not to just anyone she happens to fall in love with.
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2 out of 5 stars
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would prefer unabridged naration
- By Tamshine on 07-07-11
By: Vikram Seth
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And There Was Light
- The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
- By: Jacques Lusseyran
- Narrated by: Andre Gregory
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 279
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 244
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 247
When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.
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5 out of 5 stars
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One of the three most important books in my life
- By William R. Stevenson on 12-12-15
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 122
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 95
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Maurice
- By: E. M. Forster
- Narrated by: Peter Firth
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,154
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 987
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 990
'Ah for darkness...not the darkness of a house which coops up a man among furniture, but the darkness where he can be free!' Maurice Hall knows he must choose between living life in the shadows or denying himself a chance at love and fulfilment. Aware of his attraction to the same sex, in a time where it was considered unlawful and immoral to have homosexual desires, Maurice must decide whether to battle or submit to a prejudiced 20th-century English society.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Finally!!! It's past time!
- By Christopher P. on 11-18-10
By: E. M. Forster
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Amulet
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Adriana Sananes
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4 out of 5 stars 37
A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Read The Savage Detectives first
- By Alicia Grega on 12-05-13
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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Limonov
- The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia
- By: Emmanuel Carrère, John Lambert - translator
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: "Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes."
By: Emmanuel Carrère, and others
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 326
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 246
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Story4 out of 5 stars 246
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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5 out of 5 stars
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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Aleph
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 580
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 495
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Story4 out of 5 stars 495
Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny. his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he decides to begin again: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him. Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, he initiates a journey to revitalize his energy and passion.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Strangely compelling read
- By Kathy in CA on 11-22-11
By: Paulo Coelho