Laith
I'm at risk of over reviewing here. These are 109 fantastic, tight, well crafted pages and what I want to talk about is delivered so effectively by the story that discussing them feels like spoiling. There's so much inside of such a short story, and when told by Zweig's incredibly direct prose it means that not a sentence is wasted, it is a story that captivates for its entire length while building an atmosphere that's distinctly 1930/40s. Chess Story leaves the reader with so much to contemplate- chess, torture and isolation, focus and deliverance.
While chess is the subject of this piece, it reads as more of a character study and exploration of trauma. The story is narrated by an observer- The main character, Dr. B, is a former lawyer to the Austrian Nobility and is imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis. Rather than pulling teeth and nails, they leave him in total isolation- waiting for his eventual mental collapse. Dr. B is rescued from his torture when he steals a book of chess games, and despite having never played he quickly learns the game. At first chess delivers him from his isolation and boredom, he finally has something to do, but he begins to obsess and eventually fractures his psyche from playing games against himself. After escaping the Nazis we meet Dr. B aboard a freighter to Buenos Aires, where Dr. B interrupts a group of men playing a consultation game against Czentovic- a Yugoslav chess savant and world master. He prevents a disastrous blunder and the group persuades Dr. B to play against Czentovic.
I'll leave what happens next for other reviews to further spoil. What I will do is tell you more about Zweig because knowing his story frames so much of the atmosphere and better contextualizes the suffering of Dr. B. Zweig was like the Stephen King or J.K. Rowling of 1930s Europe, one of- if not the most translated authors of his time. He's a character out of time, part of the last generation of affluent and prominent German-Jewish intellectuals before Hitler came to power and the persecution of Jews became a priority of the state. He escaped to England in 1934 and later to the US and then Brazil in the early 1940s. Zweig watched the world crumble around him, marked for death by the SS he found himself pushed further and further into exile, torn from the European identity that he had embraced so totally in his youth. It's in this spiral that he published Chess Story and his memoir The World of Yesterday before he and his wife committed suicide in their Brazilian home.
This is a wonderful story and time capsule, and I recommend it to basically anyone.
I'm at risk of over reviewing here. These are 109 fantastic, tight, well crafted pages and what I want to talk about is delivered so effectively by the story that discussing them feels like spoiling. There's so much inside of such a short story, and when told by Zweig's incredibly direct prose it means that not a sentence is wasted, it is a story that captivates for its entire length while building an atmosphere that's distinctly 1930/40s. Chess Story leaves the reader with so much to contemplate- chess, torture and isolation, focus and deliverance.
While chess is the subject of this piece, it reads as more of a character study and exploration of trauma. The story is narrated by an observer- The main character, Dr. B, is a former lawyer to the Austrian Nobility and is imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis. Rather than pulling teeth and nails, they leave him in total isolation- waiting for his eventual mental collapse. Dr. B is rescued from his torture when he steals a book of chess games, and despite having never played he quickly learns the game. At first chess delivers him from his isolation and boredom, he finally has something to do, but he begins to obsess and eventually fractures his psyche from playing games against himself. After escaping the Nazis we meet Dr. B aboard a freighter to Buenos Aires, where Dr. B interrupts a group of men playing a consultation game against Czentovic- a Yugoslav chess savant and world master. He prevents a disastrous blunder and the group persuades Dr. B to play against Czentovic.
I'll leave what happens next for other reviews to further spoil. What I will do is tell you more about Zweig because knowing his story frames so much of the atmosphere and better contextualizes the suffering of Dr. B. Zweig was like the Stephen King or J.K. Rowling of 1930s Europe, one of- if not the most translated authors of his time. He's a character out of time, part of the last generation of affluent and prominent German-Jewish intellectuals before Hitler came to power and the persecution of Jews became a priority of the state. He escaped to England in 1934 and later to the US and then Brazil in the early 1940s. Zweig watched the world crumble around him, marked for death by the SS he found himself pushed further and further into exile, torn from the European identity that he had embraced so totally in his youth. It's in this spiral that he published Chess Story and his memoir The World of Yesterday before he and his wife committed suicide in their Brazilian home.
This is a wonderful story and time capsule, and I recommend it to basically anyone.
