Mirall trencat

by Mercè Rodoreda

Paper Book, 1992

Call number

849/.9354

Publication

Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1983 (4a ed. 1984), 297 p., [2] p. (Les Millors Obres de la Literatura Catalana; 92)

Description

In its moment of great splendor the novel was held as a mirror of society: Mercè Rodoreda shatters that mirror in this, her most ambitious novel, which tells its story in brilliant fragments, a vision reflected and refracted and finally coming together in a richly articulated mosaic of life. Through this Broken Mirror, the reader sees events and characters spanning three generations and composing a kaleidoscopic family history ranging over six decades and turning upon events both intimate and historic--most notably the Spanish Civil War. Opening with Teresa Goday, the lovely young fishmonger's daughter married to a wealthy old man, the story shifts from one perspective to another, reflecting from myriad angles the founding of a matriarchal dynasty--and its eventual, seemingly inevitable disintegration. A family saga extending from the prosperous Barcelona of the 1870s to the advent of the Franco dictatorship, A Broken Mirror is finally also a novel about the inexorable passing of time.… (more)

Media reviews

El Pont 73

User reviews

LibraryThing member gromgrel
What can I say? Mercè Rodoreda is an author in ten thousand. It's a book about multiple generations of women, their family and others related, time, decay, and memory. It's about legacy, and time's unconcerned disintegration thereof. She explores each character's peculiar fixations, passions, and
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regrets. She chooses details to linger on that explain the whole. There's an overall sense of loss. I'll definitely have to read it again someday. I'd be remiss not to mention the translator, Josep Miquel Sobrer. There were a bunch of passages and ideas that seem like they'd be really hard to translate well, but it always came out beautifully.

"Of the vanity, the hatred, the shards of love, all that was left was dust and a sad spectacle of splendor and forgetfulness."
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Language

Original publication date

1974 (Catalan)

Physical description

297 p.; 19 cm

ISBN

842971944X / 9788429719444

Barcode

2232

Other editions

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