Cuentos selectos

There may be no writer more pious with his characters than Stefan Zweig. Because, both in his novels and in his stories, he confronts them with the inexorable, but, at the same time, he tries to rescue them by all means. As if trying to protect them from a world that no longer fits their dreams and desires, the world of a yesterday that has already disappeared. An older man secretly writes love letters to a young girl, and this game of seduction forces him to face, in a cruel and inadvertent way, the lost time; Mendel, a devoted bibliophile and antiquarian, a living encyclopedia who has brought happiness to so many readers, falls dejected by a reality that ignores the sanctity of the printed word; a naive deserter who does not understand the iron law of war and the vicissitudes of politics; a blind old man who is unaware that his beloved collection is no longer what it was, and a chess game that is a parable of the end of an era, under the sinister shadow of Nazism.