Overview

Mirror is a novel shaped by reflection. Composed in twenty-four preludes and twenty-four postludes, it unfolds as a sequence of returns, in which each part echoes and alters another. The precision of musical structure meets the freedom of poetic thought. Childhood, myth, loss, and inner life are gathered into a sustained meditation on memory and time. Mirror asks what remains when so much has been lost, and what it means to remember, to love, and to endure. Vladimir Gandelsman: This is a philosophical novel about love, memory, and time - about the world as a space of reflections, where one thing ceaselessly shines through another. About how ""love is everywhere and in everything."" The motif of the mirror runs through the entire work and holds it together: ""The world is your mirror. A mirror with double glass. Every thing can be looked at from different sides, and each time it will reveal itself differently."" The magic mirror of time. ""Children are creators. That is why time in childhood seems infinite."" Precious images of childhood. The first piano lessons given by a mother, the first apprehensions of the laws of harmony. ""Where is my home? In the golden country of memory, in the dwelling of light and sorrow - in the refuge of remembrance - in eternal childhood."" An associativeness of thought bounded by nothing but music; an utterly light and free reshuffling of literary, mythological, and biblical figures (Don Quixote and the Satyr, Adam and Eve, Mowgli and the Wanderer, and so on). Beautiful and wise reflections on the allure of the writer's art, on the capturing of the future - since the future holds a reader - and on that mystery. This is a book of rare inner freedom and spiritual lucidity, in which childhood, music, myth, and the word come together into a profound knowledge of what it is to be human.

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9781968788353

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Reviews

Vladimir Gandelsman, poet: This is a philosophical novel about love, memory, and time - about the world as a space of reflections, where one thing ceaselessly shines through another. About how ""love is everywhere and in everything."" The motif of the mirror runs through the entire work and holds it together: ""The world is your mirror. A mirror with double glass. Every thing can be looked at from different sides, and each time it will reveal itself differently."" The magic mirror of time. ""Children are creators. That is why time in childhood seems infinite."" Precious images of childhood. The first piano lessons given by a mother, the first apprehensions of the laws of harmony. ""Where is my home? In the golden country of memory, in the dwelling of light and sorrow - in the refuge of remembrance - in eternal childhood."" An associativeness of thought bounded by nothing but music; an utterly light and free reshuffling of literary, mythological, and biblical figures (Don Quixote and the Satyr, Adam and Eve, Mowgli and the Wanderer, and so on). Beautiful and wise reflections on the allure of the writer's art, on the capturing of the future - since the future holds a reader - and on that mystery. This is a book of rare inner freedom and spiritual lucidity, in which childhood, music, myth, and the word come together into a profound knowledge of what it is to be human. Alexander Genis, writer: Some authors proceed from painting, others from music. Lera Auerbach's book is a symbiosis of letter and note. Her opus magnum, Mirror, can hardly be called prose. It is a ""musicalized"" poetic experience of a singular kind: a delicate, elegant, airy, yet entirely coherent weave of intricately interlaced motifs - a novel of becoming for a solo virtuoso. Solomon Volkov, writer: Mirror is a novel unusual in both conception and form. Its structure - twenty-four preludes and twenty-four postludes - transforms form itself into a mirror, in which one part reflects the other and lends it new meaning. With exceptional virtuosity, Auerbach imparts to prose the precision of construction and the subtlety of nuance that normally belong to music. At the heart of this novel lie childhood and memory: that vanishing substance of life which, despite all loss, continues to glow within the word.

Author Information

Lera Auerbach is a poet and writer whose work brings literature and music into a single artistic vision. Writing in both English and Russian, she has formed a body of work shaped by formal freedom and a voice unmistakably her own. Her writing returns to memory, time, loss, and the inward life with rare intensity and precision. In her work, the intimate opens into the vast, and personal experience becomes inseparable from the deeper continuities of culture and consciousness.

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