Chess

Faced with the prospect of an eight-hour flight recently, I thought it might be wise to take some reading material that would keep me occupied for a decent amount of time. Stefan Zweig's 1942 novella Chess seemed like a solid bet - an intriguing-sounding study into obsession, memory and isolation that would also bring me back to the German-language fiction that I had been neglecting since my degree. And while I was finished with the book in just over an hour, it certainly kept my mind working for much longer.

Chess opens with the story of a chess prodigy, Mirko Czentovic, discovered in rural Eastern Europe, who learns the game after watching his father play and becomes world champion only a decade later. Our narrator, with an amateur interest in the game, happens to find himself sharing a cruise ship with the grandmaster and does his best to lure him into a game. He first manages to gather a group of fellow enthusiasts who are eager to join forces against the champion. Not forgetting his impoverished upbringing, or perhaps due to simple greed, Czentovic agrees only upon payment to take the group on, and wins the first game easily. The second game appears to be heading the same way until a voice pipes up from the crowd, advising the players and eventually leading Czentovic into checkmate. Amazed that the world champion could have been beaten by a complete unknown, the narrator tracks down the man, and learns his identity - a wealthy Austrian monarchist who had been kept as a political prisoner by the Nazis until quite recently. It was during this time, in solitary confinement in a hotel room, that he became an expert on chess - managing one day to steal a book laying out various historic games, he saw his only escape from insanity would be to play out each game, and then to learn them. Soon he tires of the games in the book and begins to play against himself, his personality gradually splitting into black and white as he becomes increasingly obsessed with trying to beat himself. The result is a mental breakdown that turns out to be his salvation as he is moved to a sanitorium and then released.

The length of the summary above is testament to the quality of Zweig's narrative - despite weighing in at just over 70 pages, there are very few moments in Chess that can be dispensed with without losing part of what the book is actually about. Zweig writes in a clear and concise style, saying precisely what he needs to say in exploring the depths of the human mind and the dangers of being alone with one's thoughts - as the prisoner rematches against Czentovic, it becomes clear that his fanaticism has done him more harm than good. Yet as cold and grim as all this sounds, Chess was not an unenjoyable read, an interesting insight into a time now almost forgotten and an exercise in how what could have been a good novel turned out better as a drum-tight novella.

4/5

As inappropriate as it may be for such weighty subject matter, I couldn't think of anything but this...