Ricardo Lugo

At a point, the narrator, a little stunned by the level of information, offers to write on a paper what is the specific book that he is looking for.

And Mendel looks at him with a wounded pride, as if he had been proposed an humiliation.

Intolerable, because it doesn't matter to Mendel if a book was published a year ago, 200 years ago, if he had it in his hand, if he read it completely, if he barely saw it.

Mendel remembers it, period.

Any detail of a book, he can archive it in his mind.

Where it was published, who edited it, how much it cost, what was its back, if it had illustrations, if it appeared in a specific catalog.

I insist a lot on this because Stefan Zweig insists a lot on this during the story.

I think partly to understand this prodigious memory, but a very specific memory.

Mendel knows the world of books in their entirety, but not the world.

Small pause at this point.

I think that concept disturbed this fan so much in life, because it's the second time he mentions it in such an obvious way in his stories.

I mean this idea of being able to understand something to perfection.

y es algo, te dice algo sobre el mundo, pero es totalmente divorciado del mundo.

En novelas de ajedrez, si recuerdan, el personaje principal conoce al campeón de ajedrez, pero es una persona bastante deficiente en muchos otros aspectos de la vida.

Y el narrador que está en camino a Buenos Aires en un barco, quiere hablar con el campeón de ajedrez del mundo, porque por ser un genio, él sentía que las personas que dominan un espacio como ese, que son la perfección, máximo nivel de conocimiento, talento en algo,

By dominating that kingdom, they can explain a lot about the external kingdom, about the world.

But as we see in the work, it is not like that.

And as we see in this work with Mendel, it is not like that either.

It left me thinking about all those geniuses of history who had basic deficiencies in life.

There is a very famous case of a mathematician named Paul Erdos.