Language: German Original title: Buchmendel
Date Published: 1929
rating: highly recommended And back at last, after many months, has been one of our authors fetish since starting this blog: Stefan Zweig. One returns to its pages as he steps back the house of his grandparents, after many years, and finds that everything is in place and correct and smells old. Without doubt, his prose is clean, precise, fair dose of rhetoric to attract without tiring, but I think this is not what attracts me. Zweig is the best of their ability to show in a few strokes, the essence of his characters.
In this case, actually, the whole book (the book: just 50 pages) is reduced to that. I mean, the plot involves the disclosure of a person: Mendel, the books. Zweig presents it masterfully, taking it out of the shadows of oblivion, and sitting in front of our eyes on the coffee table Gluck, where the old man poured from morning to evening on the yellowed pages of his merchandise. It makes us witness the miracle introduced himself as a young man making a query bibliographical and they answer an incredible torrent of titles, authors, publishers, bookstores prices.
Mendel, the Jewish bookseller coffee Gluck, embodies the extreme contradiction between the highest and the smallest, which borders on religious experience. A myopic old and dirty, locked in the backroom of a cafe, embodying the most prodigious memory who knew the Europe of his time. A memory that, like Borges' Funes, disabled him for life and, for that matter, gave an aura of a saint, a monster, prodigy living. Zweig
captures the reader rapt description of this strange mind and with the bereaved narration of the circumstances she was lost forever. Paradoxically or not, Mendel the books is basically an essay on the forgotten.
Zweig downloads: Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman , chess fiction , The world of yesterday, Fouché. Portrait of a politician and Marie Antoinette.
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