Jaime G. MoraSEGUIR Updated: Save Send news by mail electrónicoTu name *
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The cover of Encounters with books (Cliff, 2020) the illustrated Don Quixote next to the madness and surrounded by books. is Adolf Schrödter what draws you sitting in a chair-eared, dilapidated, with the eyes fixed on a huge volume that has opened on his leg and with the other supported on a stack of books lying on the floor. There are books on a table, in a loft, there are books everywhere.
After reading this collection of texts that includes reviews, prefaces and literary articles of Stefan Zweig (Vienna, 1881; Petropolis, Brazil, 1942), it is not difficult to imagine the author also hooked to the books. In the wonderful article that gives start to this volume, Zweig points out that they had this “blessed be” as you want to go always further: “the salt of the books, which encourage us to live life without saciarnos never of her.”
Novelist, dramatist, essayist, biographer, poet, the author denounced the unreasonable nazi and that he took his own life by the impotence of seeing Europe destroying itself during the Second World War, it was always a “reader impatient and temperamental”. In the novels, as in intellectual debates, he was irritated “neat, what bombastic and everything vague and exalted, unclear and indefinite”, in short, everything that was shallow and slowing the reading.
Demanded of each page, the maximum delight, that will leave you breathless. Is what I attempted to offer in the titles that make up his vast work, and this philosophy also answers their Encounters with books, the nth window that has opened Cliff to look out at the universe Zweig. A universe made of absolute loyalty to the thought and cultural work, his “most prized possession on this earth.”
In these pages, Zweig reflects on the validity of the classics, celebrates the pleasure that provides reading stories and examines the work of authors such as Goethe, Rousseau, Stendhal, Flaubert or Balzac . “What do they mean for us today? –says about the classics– will not be more than another ten or twenty volumes, beautifully bound with which to increase our library, so nobody can say that is not complete?, or perhaps his reading may lead to even moments rewarding?”.
Of the stories of this ‘first contact with the literature”, emphasizes its power to bring back the taste for stories that, even as an adult, I continued comforting and offering a break more than necessary. “That, in the background, is one of the joys of reading.”
More than a critic, Zweig was considered to be a “singer”. When a book she liked, to mediate with the publishers and did everything possible that was translated or published. Wasn’t enough for him to enjoy them, I needed them to know. It did in dealing with their colleagues, sharing their impressions in letters or in the reviews that he published in magazines and newspapers.
And so glossed the perseverance of Rilke , accuracy, Mann or the phenomenon incomparable Joyce : “it Is a milestone in the history of literature without links neither with the past nor with the present.” In Encounters with books not only have the opportunity to continue reading to Zweig, we can also consider a mind in its fullness.
