Mario Benedetti – författare

'Perhaps that moment had been exceptional, but still, I felt alive. That pressure on my chest means being alive.'Forty-nine, with a kind face, no serious ailments (apart from varicose veins on his ankles), a good salary and three moody children, widowed accountant Martín Santomé is about to retire. He assumes he'll take up gardening, or the guitar, or whatever retired people do. What he least expects is to fall passionately in love with his shy young employee Laura Avellaneda. As they embark upon an affair, happy and irresponsible, Martín begins to feel the weight of his quiet existence lift - until, out of nowhere, their joy is cut short. The intimate, heartbreaking diary of an ordinary man who is reborn when he falls in love one final time, this beloved Latin American novel has been translated into twenty languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, and is now published in Penguin Classics for the first time.

An extraordinary story of love and exile, from one of the great masters of the Latin American novel'Having news from you is like opening a window'Santiago is trapped. Taken political prisoner in Montevideo after a brutal military coup, he can do nothing but write letters to his family, and try to stay sane. Far away in a different country, his father tries to adjust to life in exile, his daughter marvels at the big city, and his beautiful, careworn wife finds herself irresistibly drawn to another man, as day by day Santiago edges closer to freedom. Told with tenderness and fury through the voices of a family torn apart by history, Springtime in a Broken Mirror asks whether shattered lives can ever truly be mended. 'A masterful novel ... a remarkable collage of unique perspectives - or shards from that eponymous broken mirror' The National

"It gives me great pleasure to see the work of Benedetti, one of the great poets of our language, made available to US readers in Popkin's wonderful translations. Her carefully crafted adaptations of Mario's poems convey all the wisdom, nostalgia, and irony that inform his verses in language that retains their musicality. Anyone who has translated poetry will appreciate what an accomplishment that represents."--Claribel Alegria Mario Benedetti (1920--2009) is regarded as one of Latin America's most important twentieth-century writers and one of Uruguay's most revered writers of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and essays.