{"id":64,"date":"2008-07-13T00:22:01","date_gmt":"2008-07-13T04:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookse.wordpress.com\/?p=64"},"modified":"2017-09-23T11:40:49","modified_gmt":"2017-09-23T15:40:49","slug":"stefan-zweigs-chess-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2008\/07\/13\/stefan-zweigs-chess-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Stefan Zweig: Chess Story<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Chess Story<\/strong><\/em> <\/span>
\nby Stefan Zweig (Schachnovelle<\/em>, 1942) <\/span>
\ntranslated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (2005) <\/span>
\nNYRB Classics (2005) <\/span>
\n104 pp<\/span><\/p>\n

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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]H[\/fusion_dropcap]ere’s a short one (hardly a novella,\u00a0more than\u00a0a short story) that didn’t stay long on my “currently reading” list but will make its way there again.\u00a0Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story<\/em> (Schachnovelle<\/em>, 1942; tr. from the German by Joel Rotenberg, 2006), published after Zweig and his wife committed suicide in Brazil, “one of Hitler’s posthumous victims,” said Peter Gay in the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition.\u00a0I’m not well informed about Zweig’s life or work, but it’s time I learned, and\u00a0I’m glad to say I’ve begun. Before we begin the review, though, I want to highlight this\u00a0magnificent cover, which\u00a0features a fitting detail from The Chess Game<\/em>, a painting by Vieira da Silva.<\/p>\n

Chess Story<\/em> begins and ends on an ocean liner going from New York to Buenos Aires.\u00a0The narrator discovers that Mirko Czentovic, the world champion chess master, is on board.\u00a0Czentovic has an intriguing story.\u00a0Raised by a priest, he was basically\u00a0forsaken as a child because he had no visible intelligence.\u00a0He never learned how to spell or how to interact with people.\u00a0But he watched the priest play chess and, for some reason, chess stuck.\u00a0When the priest found this hidden skill he compared Czentovic to “Balaam’s ass!”\u00a0Lacking most other skills, Czentovic quickly rose to become the best in the world, and with that rank came no little amount of pride.\u00a0The narrator wants to meet Czentovic to attempt to understand him a little better.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Czentovic is not the book’s true subject, as I was led to believe at first.\u00a0While the narrator and some other men are together playing against Czentovic,\u00a0out of obscurity comes\u00a0Dr. B, who helps the men achieve a draw with the chess master.\u00a0The men immediately say that he must challenge the world master in a game just between the two of them.\u00a0As it plays out, Dr. B is\u00a0a man with an even more interesting story story than Czentovic,\u00a0but he hasn’t played a proper game of chess in over twenty years.<\/p>\n

“You see,” he added with a pensive smile, “I honestly don’t know if I can play a proper chess game according to all the rules.\u00a0Please believe me, it was absolutely not out of false modesty that I said I hadn’t touched a chess piece since grammar school — that was more than twenty years ago.\u00a0And even then I wasn’t considered a player of any particular talent.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet Dr. B\u00a0has come to know the game in a way that Czentovic never could.\u00a0How Dr. B. came to learn chess is the main story here.\u00a0Where Czentovic became proud and cold, Dr. B’s knowledge changed him in a different, more fundamental way.\u00a0And in\u00a0telling\u00a0Dr. B’s story, Zweig\u00a0indicts Nazi Germany.\u00a0With a pace that keeps winding and winding in tighter and tighter circles, Zweig propels\u00a0his story to its pleasing, disturbing denouement.<\/p>\n

This is my first encounter with Zweig, an Austrian writer who apparently was one of the world’s most recognized and respected writers in the early 20th century.\u00a0I have Beware of Pity<\/em> on my shelf and anxiously wait to read it.<\/p>\n

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