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...

The White Boy Shuffle

As is natural for any middle-class white man growing up in rural England, I have long been a fan of hip-hop, basketball, Spike Lee films and many other aspects of black American culture. Perhaps it's precisely because it's all so far removed from my own experience that I find it all so engaging and intriguing, perhaps it's the varying depths to it, or maybe it's because it all just sounds so fun. In any case, I'm fairly sure I would be considered one of the Caucasians on the outside looking in that Paul Beatty takes aim at in 1996's The White Boy Shuffle.

Primarily a poet, Beatty's debut novel is a paradoxically rambling yet tight coming-of-age tale tracking the exploits of one Gunnar Kaufmann, an obscenely gifted young black man growing up in 1980s Los Angeles. Gunnar introduces himself by way of his ancestry, a procession of shameless servants to the white man, from the man who accidentally kicked off the War of Independence to the ballet-composing great-great-great grandfather who voluntarily subjected himself to slavery, to Gunnar's own estranged father now working as a sketch artist for the LAPD. Gunnar himself grows up in an affluent neighbourhood in Southern California, up until the point his mother decides his experience thus far hasn't been "black" enough and promptly relocates the family to an entirely non-white area of the city, named The Hillside here but likely based on Compton. At first, Gunnar struggles to fit in in pretty much any way, but gradually learns to make the most of what he has. It's here that the book really kicks off, introducing a host of colourful characters and plot lines. Gunnar discovers a God-given talent for basketball despite never having played before, joins the city's most hopeless gang (The Gun Totin' Hooligans, hopeless because, despite their name, they refuse to carry guns) and by way of friend Nicholas is introduced to jazz and intellectualism. For all the success basketball brings him, he discovers his true talent is poetry, and begins spray painting his work on the neighbourhood walls.

This all makes for an entertaining and at times laugh-out-loud read - made all the more enjoyable by Beatty's exceptionally good prose style. His background in poetry is clear to see, the words veritably tumbling off the page in a flurry of alliteration, assonance and wordplay, and the poems he creates for Gunnar are worthy of a collection in their own right.

But as fun as all this sounds, The White Boy Shuffle is not without its heavier moments, especially as it moves into the final third. Accepting a scholarship to Boston University, Gunnar becomes increasingly disillusioned with the classmates and academics who worship his every move just because of his colour, the black student groups who defeat their own object with their rabid exceptionalism, and the feeling that none of it matters anyway. His trips around the country to play basketball with Nicholas become less fun as the white crowds continue to turn on him, he can't attend class for fear of being mobbed, and despite his best efforts to shun the attention of the black student groups, he ends up becoming a cult leader to them anyway. Once Nicholas commits suicide, Gunnar heads with his Japanese mail-order wife back to LA to establish a commune for minorities, ultimately turning his back on the world and daring the government to drop a nuclear bomb on the city to solve the issue once and for all.

Beatty tackles some truly weighty themes: hypocrisy on all sides, the inherent racism and classism that pervades American society and the fundamental ineffectiveness of idealism, and satirises them all with little mercy. The White Boy Shuffle is a million miles removed from any life I'll ever know, but it certainly made me understand a bit better why being black in America is quite so hard. Beatty's concluding verse sums it up in all its painful simplicity:

Like the Reverend King
I too "have a dream"
but when I wake up
I forget it and
remember I'm running late for work.

4.5/5

Twenty years on and Kendrick Lamar is still having to say all the same things.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon

Every now and then, I like to read something completely different. And it doesn't get much more "different" than Man-Eaters of Kumaon, the personal account of Colonel Jim Corbett about his exploits in tracking the tigers and leopards posing a threat to the citizens of Northern India in the 1920s and 30s. Born and raised in the area, Corbett spent his childhood learning the ways of the jungle, and it was from this background that he came to be seen as the only man to be called on to help the local population, of whom an estimated 1200 were killed by various animals at the time.

I found Man-Eaters of Kumaon, and I am sure that this is as a result of its having been written in 1944, to be a book of bizarre contrasts. Corbett clearly possessed a talent for descriptive writing, and combined with his exceptional knowledge of the area's flora and fauna, creates a wonderfully vivid image of the jungles and valleys in which he stalks the tigers. He was also clearly a great lover of nature and is keen to stress that man should make great efforts to limit his impact upon it. All of which goes out of the window somewhat as he goes around shooting tigers, deer, birds and landing hundreds of fish. While his reasons for it were fair enough - to protect the lives of others, and for food - it did seem something of a contradiction to me. Likewise, in his interactions with the local population, Corbett describes their cultures and customs in a way that only someone who had put in the time and effort to understand and appreciate them could - but is more than happy to be waited on hand and foot whenever he reaches a village, and of course is clear on the point that the locals are incapable of sorting out their own problems with these animals. On balance though, Corbett takes care to describe the reasons that these tigers became dangerous to humans - always some form of injury or illness that rendered them unable to hunt their usual prey - and the fact he shows any respect to local culture at all is admirable given the historical context.

Otherwise, the book was an enjoyable enough read, despite some archaic language use and a liberal sprinkling of (what I assume to be) Pubjabi or Hindi loan words with little explanation. Corbett makes the hunts as much about the build up as the actual kills themselves, leading to some heart-stopping moments as he suddenly finds himself face to face with a man-eating tiger after days of tracking, or almost running out of time to find his quarry after six weeks in the wild and the prospect of letting down the locals weighing over him. He takes care to explain his tracking techniques, based on a staggering knowledge of the network of interactions between animal life in the region, and switches up narrative styles by including first-hand anecdotes by villagers who had survived encounters with the animals and official reports from the time. There are even some moments of (perhaps unintentional) humour, as Corbett drops in incidental details probably deserving of chapters in their own right. "That house was definitely haunted, but this isn't a book of ghost stories", and "at that point we were almost killed by a leopard but I'm talking about a tiger at the moment" were two highlights from this point of view.

Ultimately, Man-Eaters of Kumaon is an interesting throwback to a time when man and nature were still not quite on equal terms, a time when the British Empire was still very much in force in India, and an account from a man whose own story is often more interesting than those he is telling.

4/5

There was a whole range of songs I could have gone with here, but with apologies to Nelly Furtado I had to go with the one that reflected Corbett's prose style best. So many tigers...

A Little Book of Language

It's fair to say that I've shown more of an interest in language than most over the course of my life. I wouldn't have ended up with an MA in translation and gone on to work in the field otherwise - and I wouldn't be looking to add more and more languages to my collection if that interest wasn't ongoing. Linguistics, however, is an area of language I haven't touched on much, despite being one that I find very interesting. As it turned out, David Crystal's A Little Book of Language, a crash course on the huge range of topics that fall under that umbrella, was a very good entry point.

Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on linguistics, but this particular book dials back the academic side of things, being presented for children. This meant that the style was simple, the content laid out in a straightforward manner, and everything backed up with plenty of practical examples. And as good as my technical knowledge of language - or rather languages - may be, I appreciated it for all of these things. As Crystal says, the study of language is perhaps the biggest field of study of all, and I'm sure I would have felt lost at least in some places had things not been spelled out so clearly.

That being said, there were moments where I wished that he had been a bit more direct. While the examples were useful, there were also a lot of them; at times too many for my liking for the sake of making what could be quite simple points. And the writing style as a whole came across at times like a grandfather rambling on to his grandchildren, whether they showed any interest or not.

Ultimately, though, there was a lot to enjoy here, and a lot to learn. For instance, how the majority of the world's languages have never been properly studied and mapped out, to the extent that we still have no idea how most languages outside of the Indo-European sphere relate to each other. Or that we probably never will, as one language is lost every couple of weeks. And how even languages that have been studied for centuries, like English, are far from being completely documented in terms of their every usage.

Best of all were the chapters on the very first stages of language - the ways in which parents adapt their speech patterns to pass language onto their children, who then go through a multitude of processes to form sound, combine sounds to form words, and then words to speak coherently. It seems like an impossible task when broken down that way, and I was left amazed that we ever managed to talk at all.

4/5

So I can only imagine the amount of brainpower that would go into something like this:

Closing Time

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has been my favourite book since I first read it at the age of 17, and I have yet to come across anything since that matches it in terms of its combination of genuinely epic scope combined with microscopic attention to detail, and passage after passage that resonate even after multiple readings and a million times removed from the situation in which Heller found his inspiration.

So how can you create a sequel to perfection? Well, Heller tried, although it took him over 30 years, and the result, like a lot of sequels, is a long way short of what came before. Not to say that Closing Time is a bad book; far from it.

Set in 1994, it catches up with three of the more interesting characters from Catch-22 to survive World War II - protagonist Yossarian, who has made his fortune, started a family and is now faced for the second time with a genuine prospect of death; Milo Minderbinder, who, having expanded his trade empire into a global, multi-billion dollar conglomerate, is now trying to sell planes to the government; and the squadron chaplain, pursued by the FBI for his ability to produce tritium organically. Heller fills in the events in their lives since the war ended - and since the fate of all three was ambiguous at the end of Catch-22, it was actually quite nice to hear that things had been going relatively well. While it was slightly disappointing that Yossarian's solution to the titular catch had failed, it was necessary for the purposes of this book that he was still caught in it, and all three are provided with a certain amount of closure as to their problems in the first book.

That only accounts for half of the plot, however, the rest being given over to Sammy Singer, who appears in Catch-22 although I believe not by name, and his childhood friend Lew Rabinowitz, who served in the war as an infantryman. These parts I found harder to get through; their tales of working-class Jewish life in Coney Island almost impossible to identify with and the fact that Heller writes them in a much more conventional prose style to be very jarring with the rest of the book. There were some moments of poignancy but these were few and far between, and I had to wonder why Heller had decided to include this plot line at all.

But there was much to like elsewhere; more than enough, in fact, that I could enjoy the book as a whole. Heller's dialogue positively fizzes back and forth between characters, there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud lines, and he finds room to slip in quite a few catch-22 scenarios for the present day. None of this is anything like on the level of Catch-22 itself, but he had an impossible act to follow in that respect. And indeed the book stands on its own at times as well, as Heller slices through late 20th-century consumerist excess, the everlasting obtuseness of military bureaucracy (the scenes where Milo pitches his new stealth bomber to a bickering group of government advisers are by far the best in the novel), and the it-couldn't-happen-could-it ludicrousness of American politics, as the book's unnamed president inadvertently brings about nuclear Armageddon by mistake while playing a video game.

So all in all, it's not a bad follow up to the best book of all time - in lots of ways a spiritual successor, in other ways trying to do something a bit different and for the most part succeeding at both. It's almost as funny, almost as sad, and way more bizarre - and given the bar that had been set for it, that's no mean achievement.

4/5

This is a book about the end, and the book itself states that this is the soundtrack to it. I can kind of see it.

Life... With No Breaks/Mad Love

A week's holiday requires some easy reading - and it doesn't get much easier than Nick Spalding. Having read a couple of his books, I consider myself a fan, and so it wasn't too much of a challenge to get through two more in a matter of days.

Life... With No Breaks was Spalding's debut, and actually his most interesting concept - could he write a fully fleshed book in 24 hours? Well, yes and no. Firstly because it took (slightly) longer than that, and secondly because the result isn't your average book. It's more of a conversation with the reader, as Spalding takes considerable time to introduce himself and recap why he has set himself this challenge. From there, though, it is an interesting and enjoyable read as he slides between topics nicely, bemoaning various aspects of modern British life and veritably churning out one-liners in the process. And he's not afraid to go deeper, touching on death, his divorce, previous failures in the literary sphere and the inevitable passage of time. I also found it a good indication of the origin of his writing style, which I have found inflexible in the past - it turns out his characters all talk like he does. All in all it's an interesting idea well executed.

Mad Love is a much more conventional rom-com novel that follows a man from London and a woman from California as a dating website, as a publicity stunt, singles them out for marriage based on the compatibility of their profiles. The prospect of £30,000 and a rent-free year in a penthouse flat is enough to convince Adam, a video game reviewer, and Jessica, a student in nutrition, to go through with it. The wedding itself is dealt with quickly, and the plot soon settles into a routine of arguments as it turns out their profiles may not have been entirely honest. Mad Love lacks, for the most part, the ingredients that got me into Spalding's other work - the laugh-out-loud moments, well-constructed scenes and memorable characters. The ending was predictable, and the dialogue just didn't quite work at times. But the book as a whole was saved by a moment of breathtaking sadness that proved that, if Spalding ever decides to write something serious, he would probably do a very good job.

All in all, I pretty much knew what to expect going in and both books delivered - lighter than air, capable of raising a smile, and a much-needed break before going back into the heavy stuff.

Life... With No Breaks - 3.5/5
Mad Love - 3/5

Life... With No Breaks seems to have anticipated a trend that has recently emerged in music of writing fully-formed songs in as little time as possible.  This is the best combination of time/result:

The Sports Gene - Talent, Practice and the Truth About Success

It wasn't until around the age of 12 that I realised I was quite good at sports. Until then I had been limited to a few modest appearances for my school's lower rugby teams, and had been improving rapidly at swimming since the age of about five. But that year, I found myself picking up any sport I tried in PE with relative ease - hockey, basketball, softball and more. Even in the traditional schoolboy pursuits of football and cricket, where my prior lack of talent had led me to believe I wasn't an athlete, I started to find myself performing well above average. Fast forward ten years and after varying levels of success in athletics, squash, rugby, American football and swimming and water polo - often training in several of these at any one time - I found myself dropping back down to simply water polo. It was just the sport where I found it easiest to stay competitive at a high level: I enjoyed and relished the training in a way I no longer did for anything else. And not that I was exactly world class, but I have always wondered where that sudden change came from; whether any sporting talent had lain dormant since birth, or if simply sticking at it for long enough meant that I improved where others who hadn't put in the practice didn't.

In The Sports Gene, American writer and former collegiate middle distance runner David Epstein discusses this dichotomy at length. He begins, appropriately, with examples of both sides of the argument. Specifically, Swedish high jumper Stefan Holm who, despite his relatively small stature, had the fortune to grow up near one of Europe's premier indoor track and field facilities. From childhood, he devoted hours to the high jump, and peaked with a gold at the Athens Olympics. However, in the 2007 World Championships he was defeated by Donald Thomas, a Bahamian who had taken up the event only a year earlier on a bet. So, Epstein states, it is possible to succeed in sport through both relentless practice and by being genetically gifted. But it is the extent to which these might be linked that forms the bulk of the book, and by far its most interesting passages.

Epstein delves into a wide range of sports and scientific ideas, from the ability of elite level athletes to identify a game situation after being shown an image faster than the human brain should be able to process, to the fact that it might actually be arm length rather than height that fuels basketball success, onto the work in identifying genetic variation in humans that might pinpoint the area of sport where an individual might excel.

In essence this is a compendium of sports biology, but Epstein saves it from reading like a journal entry by his ability to spin a yarn. He introduces a host of eccentric characters in the field, from the Greek geneticist obsessed with mapping the genomes of Jamaican sprinters, to the American who travels to Kenya each year to hold distance running trials for academically gifted teenagers who have never run a race in their life. All of the teenagers belong to a single ethnic group, the Kalenjin, and nearly all of those selected go on to full athletic scholarships at American colleges. There is also a truly heartwarming story of a recovering drug addict from Alaska who went on to become the greatest sled dog racer of all time by identifying huskies with an innate desire to keep running and breeding that trait into a whole team. Epstein ends with his own travels in Finland speaking to the family of one of the country's greatest ever cross country skiers - quite a few of whom possess a genetic mutation increasing their red blood cell count to superhuman levels. I can't pretend to have understood all of the science, but it is presented so clearly and accessibly that I found myself learning a lot about the basic concepts.

There were a few issues, however. In making his work entertaining, Epstein has a habit of diverging into unnecessarily flowery prose at times, which I found slightly irritating. The science behind all of this remains largely a new branch and he is careful to remind the reader that the studies he mentions have either not been repeated or deal with such a specific group that they can't be considered representative of humanity as a whole. As he says, it is possible through gene mapping to identify about a billion people in the world who have absolutely no chance of making the Olympic 100m final - but the people themselves could already have told you that. I also feel that he missed a fairly obvious conclusion in that when the traits of physical suitability and an obsession with training coincide in an individual, you get athletes that transcend their sport - the Cristiano Ronaldos, Serena Williamses and Lebron Jameses of the world.

Ultimately, though, I found it absolutely fascinating that we may one day be able to discover the genetic keys to elite athletic ability, and this book was the ideal introduction into a very complex field. I was happy enough to take away the fact that my swimming ability might just be down to my relatively short legs - the same length, in fact, as Michael Phelps'. Never mind that he is four inches taller and blessed with the desire to spend eight hours a day in a pool...

4/5

Really this was just an opportunity to learn obscure facts about sports I don't usually follow.