‘The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.’Chess, the ‘Royal Game’, ‘regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory only to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift.’ Stefan Zweig plunges the reader into this cold, calculating world through a simple premise of a chess match between the reigning world champion and a mysterious doctor who reveals an incredible knowledge of the game’s strategy despite his claims that he hasn’t touched a chessboard for over twenty years. In a mere 80 pages, Zweig’s Chess Story, reaches an emotional and psychological depth that leaves the reader shivering with horror through a haunting allegory of Nazi Germany where human lives are mere wooden pieces to be strategically moved and sacrificed by an indifferent hand.Zweig’s grasp on human nature is chillingly accurate, and the few characters presented come alive through such simple descriptions of their psychology, made easily accessible through having a psychologist serve as the narrator. Czentovic, the reigning world chess champion, quickly develops into a lifelike monomaniac through the brief summary of his life. This apathetic, uneducated youth miraculously develops a keen intellect for chess, being described as ‘Balaam’s ass’ when his talents are revealed, and quickly defeats chess masters across the world which ‘transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.’ Zweig presents us with a highly unlikeable adversary, a wealthy, self-important man who looks upon all those around him as if they ‘were lifeless wooden pieces’ despite his vulgar manners and ‘boundless ignorance’ towards anything intellectual aside from chess (there is a wonderful aside where the narrators fried remarks ‘isn’t it damn easy to think you’re a great man if you aren’t troubled by the slightest notion that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante, or Napoleon even existed?’). We can all put a face to this character, we’ve all encountered someone vain and offensive who, despite our disdain, will always be able to sneer down upon us because we are no match to the one talent they hold most dear. While aboard a steamship, the passengers arrange a chess match with the great Czentovic, him versus all others, in which he crushed them in the first game without hiding his arrogance of being the superior. Enter our hero, Dr. B, an immediately likeable, shy and nervous man with an immense intellect that bestows a method for forcing a draw with the great chess master. For the majority of the novella, the reader must face the horrors of Dr. B’s pas to understand where his talents grew, somehow blossoming in the cracks of soul-crushing interment in the Gestapo headquarters. Often relaying the story in the second-person, the use of ‘you’ brings the reader into maddening solitude of Dr. B, enduring his pain along with him, and even the most calloused of readers must come away with a residue of unbearable horrors and madness forever coating their consciousness. Zweig, having fled his home in Austria in fear of the Nazis, forces the reader to witness and endure a fate worse than the sickening dehumanization and deathly labor of a concentration camp, but to share in his solitude, emphasized in frightening proportions by Dr. B’s torment that is ‘a force more sophisticated than crude beating of physical torture: the most exquisite isolation imaginable’.The allegory presented in the novella is sickening enough to rot any heart. We have Germany ruled by an inhumane, obdurate hand, cold and calculating in each move it makes, and we have the artistic mind going mad in solitude. Creativity and art is trampled by the sinister, calculating powers that march forward seeking victory, unshaken by the countless lives that must be sacrificed to achieve it. Chess, however, is a game of two sides, black and white, and Zweig pushes his allegory even further to represent this duality. As in the ‘blind’ games played in Dr. B’s head, Germany undergoes schizophrenia of sorts, declaring war on itself by seeking to exterminate those within, be it for their religious or political views. While chess becomes a solace to Dr. B, it can also be observed as a metaphor of National Socialism – what had roots as something empowering, something to cling to in order to rise up from the depth of depression (ie. his solitude or the state of Germany post-WWI), can become something fierce, violent and destructive as history has revealed and as is seen in the mania that grips our hero in this tale. Zweig displays a mastery over his writing much as his characters do over chess. While the subject matter is sure to weigh heavy on the mind¹, the writing comes across effortlessly and pleasingly, almost as if it were intended to purvey an uplifting, humorous tale. I had a laugh as Zweig probed my own literary pretentions, casting Czentovic’s vain disinterest and quick removal from the vicinity of a chess match between two ‘third-rate’ players as being ‘as naturally as any of us might toss aside a bad detective novel in a bookstore without even opening it, he walked away from our table and out of the smoking room.’ The language flows and manages to embrace the reader through its simplicity, although it drags along a heavy burden with it. There was one aspect of the narrative that specifically caught my attention, and as I am still just a blind child testing the waters of literature, I would like to present to those of you whom I look up to this query of mine. Zweig often has his narrator connect the dots for the reader, such as when Czentovic states that he allowed the draw to happen, saying ‘I deliberately gave him a chance’, a few lines later the narrator asserts that ‘as we all knew, Czentovic had certainly not magnanimously given our unknown benefactor a chance, and this remark was nothing more than a simple-minded excuse for his own failure.’ Now, most readers would have been able to draw this conclusion themselves, and it seems a bit insulting that Zweig would feel he has to baby the reader (this happens multiple times in the first thirty pages), however, as the narrator is not Zweig, or even anyone purporting to be a writer, but instead a psychologist, does that excuse the overly explanatory nature of the writing? The narrator, being a psychologist, would want the reader to understand because, as he states, he wants to be able to analyze the mind of a monomaniac and this method ensures the reader is keeping up. Or, on the other hand (chess is black and white, might as well make room for a battle of wits here), is this method something to be a bit disappointed with? Perhaps I am spoiled having read so much Faulkner in my teens and finding enjoyment in authors that leave much to the reader to piece together. I would be very interested to see what my goodread friends think of this technique, as I want to excuse Zweig because he is keeping to a proper voice, yet I dislike it when authors explain things. For years I’ve deplored Ayn Rand for not letting so much as a scoff emit from a character without explaining the implications of the scoff.Chess Story is a tiny powerhouse of depth. The conclusion had me pacing back and forth in the snow smoking a cigarette to calm the ever-increasing beating of my heart. It is horrific, it is harrowing, it is pure brilliance floating from the page. Despite it’s small size, this is not a novella to be taken lightly, as it will leave a dark cloud over your thoughts once the final page has found its way into your heart. Zweig is a master of the human psychology, and a master and condensing such potent messages into a tiny novella. The clash between an uncaring, calculating intellect and the manic but human mind of a hero will grip you until the end, which comes both mercifully soon (this book is easily read in an hour), yet far too soon. The allegory is ripe and shakes you to the core.4.5/5¹ The fact that Zweig eliminated his own map shortly after completion of Chess Story will come as no surprise, for the darkness this story wallows in is something that an optimistic mind wouldn’t dare approach. As Nietzsche said: ‘ if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’. When I was at the edge of my teenage years, a former English teacher and close friend of mine warned me of wallowing in the darkness of literature and philosophy, telling me ‘the longer you flirt with darkness, the more it seeps into your soul’, which, while being a spin on the Nietzsche quote, has never left the back of my mind. From that I learned to climb out from the depths and appreciate things that satisfy a lighter side of myself, the white side of the chessboard, without spending all my time feeding the darker side. Without such guidance I wouldn't be here to write this today.‘But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end?’
Mirko Czentovic, at age 20, is the world chess champion. He had humble beginnings, an orphan who was cared for by a priest after his impoverished father, a boatman, died in an accident. At an early age he had shown signs of stupidity. He failed at school, couldn't write sentences in any language without committing mistakes and spoke very little. Then, by accident, his talent for chess was discovered.Even when he was already world champion his character remained the same. He was still the same "complete stranger to the world of the mind, a stolid, taciturn, rustic youth from whom even the wiliest of journalists never succeeded in coaxing a single word that was the least use for publicity purposes." But the novel's narrator, a passenger in a cruiseship bound for Buenos Aires where Mirko Czentovic was also aboard on his way to play at some tournaments in Argentina, still found the latter interesting as he:"has always been interested in any kind of monomaniac obsessed by a single idea, for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity; characters like this, apparently remote from reality, are like termites using their own material to build a remarkable and unique small-scale version of the world."During the trip a wealthy passenger manages to persuade the reclusive chess champion to play against him (for a fee of $250 per game). The first game was easily won by Mirko Czentovic. During the second game, a stranger named Dr. B whispered suggested moves and strategies to the businessman, after preventing him from committing a blunder he was about to make, and this led to the game being drawn. This man said he hasn't played chess for more than 20 years. Mirko Czentovic, correctly sensing that this man was the one who thought of those strong saving moves which drew the second game, challenged him (and anybody interested) to a match the next day.Before the next match, Dr. B told the narrator that he will accept the challenge to play only on condition that it will only be for one game. Then he told the story of how he came to play good chess. I leave something here now for future readers of this novel but suffice it to say here that Dr. B's story is itself interesting but its meaning only came out the next day when he was playing already their second game, after beating the chess champion in their first game.The author, with this ending, was in his elements as he definitely knew what he was writing about. By the time this book was published in 1944, he and his wife had been dead, having committed double suicide in Petropolis, near Rio de Janeiro, on 23 February 1942. This, after rhetorically asking in this book:"Is (chess) not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad's coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance--but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all the books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations. In the old days of the enthusiasm for physiognomy, a physician like Gall might perhaps have dissected a chess champion's brain to find out whether some particular twist or turn in the grey matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump, is more developed in such chess geniuses than in the skulls of other mortals. And how intrigued such a physiognomist would have been by the case of Czentovic, where that specific genius appeared in a setting of absolute intellectual lethargy, like a single vein of gold in a hundredweight of dull stone. In principle, I had always realized that such a unique, brilliant game must create its own matadors, but how difficult and indeed impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active human being whose world is reduced entirely to the narrow one-way traffic between black and white, who seeks the triumphs of his life in the mere movement to and fro, forward and back of thirty-two chessmen, someone to whom a new opening, moving knight rather than pawn, is a great deed, and his little corner of immortality is tucked away in a book about chess--a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!"Touche! I'm so glad this novel has been included in the latest updated list of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die!
What do You think about Chess Story (2005)?
There are battles being fought; and yet to be fought. There is the battle for the human soul. To know who I am. And then there are other people. The battle there is over simple understanding. I have witnessed retreat. Go away. Go away. In isolation I have studied the possible moves. Some win; some lose. Sometimes a draw. And then I think I'm ready to play again. Even knowing how it always ends.So they placed the board on the table. And fitted the figures, black and white. And Stefan Zweig sat down, his wife by his side. But he had played this game before. He knew all the possible moves. One side of his mouth began to twitch. He stood and paced.We all watched him with some amazement, but none with as much unease as I, for it struck me that his steps always measured out the same distance despite the intensity of his pacing; it was as though each time he ran up against an invisible barrier in the middle of the empty room, forcing him to reverse course. And I knew with a shiver that in his pacing he was unconsciously tracing the dimensions of his cell; during his months of incarceration he must have paced in just this way.Zweig would not go back. We were all eager to see what he would do. But instead of making a move, he slowly and resolutely swept the pieces off the board with the back of his hand. It took us a moment to understand: Czentovic had resigned.I hold this book in my hand. Swallowed it whole. Zweig wrote this is 1942. He fled Austria when Hitler came. Then London; then Brazil. In his isolation he knew how it would end. And perhaps how it would begin again. So he wrote this. An allegory. He saw himself in the sweeping tides of history. Saw it all. Only the queen and king remained. Or maybe it was just two pawns. And he swept them from the board.
—Tony
...nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void. (19)Black. White. Which is it? Which one is our nature? We can be good, we can be cruel. We praise ourselves saying being human entails being good. We have daily proofs that is not necessary the case. If we are meant to be good and we are not, our mind have lost the battle against a deviation. Or against our true nature. Now that is a depressing thought.I had this book on my to-read shelf for months. And I wasn't going to read it this soon. A Goodreads group crossed my path and here I am. I am so glad it did. I was missing a brilliant, perceptive observer of the human condition. Zweig had a keen eye to deal with the psychological aspects of human beings with the simplicity that characterizes great writers. Humble erudition is what makes me love an author. Complicated writing and pretentious words are fine if they are used properly; otherwise, everything is forgettable. I don't only need to know that you know; let me learn too. Black. White. The mind has to choose. A million possibilities lying in a black and white board with sixty-four little squares dividing A from B. Day from night. Good from evil. A dichotomy present in every human life. It is there, inside, waiting for a decision. You are thinking: Which path should I take?Time. Time is needed to decide. And often it is not enough.Keep the pressure on, advance instead of defending! (14)Zweig seems to be the kind of author that share the characters' psyches without hesitation. That help us understand more. Even while writing about how the mind is supposed to work, with the complexity that such a task entails. But he succeeded and with a beautiful, simple and refreshing prose. You feel what he wrote. He tended to repeat keywords in order to emphasize a particular situation, thought, feeling, etc.; that embellishes the sentence with a unique melody.The novella starts with a recount of Mirko Czentovic's story, the world chess champion. A young man whose ignorance was universal in all fields, but played chess like no one in the world and was now visiting my dear Buenos Aires. As soon as Mirko had done his chores around the house, he sat stolidly in the living-room with that vacant gaze seen in sheep out at pasture, paying not the least attention to what was going on around him. (5)That was described as apathy. To be able to switch off the inner processes that often haunt us, just for a minute, in order to subtract yourself from reality and dwell in reverie... Or nothing. To think nothing. To want nothing. To put the restless soul in a lethargic state without knowing what is going on around us. Well...Anyway, the boy learnt to play chess only by looking at some men playing it. (Hard to imagine, and I am not saying it because I tried that when I was younger. But why on earth would I question that fact in literature? Strangest things have happened.) Czentovic was a grotesque, simple-minded boy lost in the world of the mind. A boy that in a relatively short period of time, after tasting the bittersweet elixir of money and fame, became a cold, ostentatiously proud person. Unfortunately, several times I had the unpleasant experience of seeing how a simple person that came from a humble background could turn into an arrogant figure after achieving some material success.Arrogance and confidence are two different things. And that relies on the fact that despite his annoying pride, Czentovic was still insecure. He never talked to well-educated people because he feared he would say something stupid. Behind that self-absorbed body language, an overwhelming insecurity was hidden.There is psychological material in everyone, even in the apparently simplest man of all.Black. White. A steppenwolf inside. Which nature will defeat the other? Does our opinion matter? And, which one are we? A. B. Both. The reckless combination of light and darkness. Always obsessively looking for a referent. An answer. A cure. The permanence of sanity.You were left irredeemably alone with yourself, your body, and the four or five silent objects, table, bed, window, washbasin... There was nothing to do, nothing to hear, nothing to see, you were surrounded everywhere, all the time, by the void, that entirely spaceless, timeless vacuum. You walked up and down, and your thoughts went up and down with you, up and down, again and again. But even thoughts, insubstantial as they may seem, need something to fix on, or they begin to rotate and circle aimlessly around themselves; they can’t tolerate a vacuum either. You kept waiting for something from morning to evening, and nothing happened. You waited again, and yet again. Nothing happened. You waited, waited, waited, you thought, you thought, you thought until your head was aching. Nothing happened. You were left alone. Alone. Alone. (19)This novella was a delight to read. All the characters amused me or disgusted me with the same intensity. Zweig described them so vividly. His writing reflects the characters' mood with perfection. I could almost hear the sneer coming from McConnor's rage after losing his first game. I could almost see Czentovic's cold and defying eyes while playing his insensitive game. Or Dr B. predicting all the possible moves with ecstatic frenzy. I suddenly became another eager witness in the middle of a growing excitement. I could also feel the oppression of his soul while he was narrating his confinement in an empty room. I read and absorbed it all. His despair, his tedium, sorrow and fear. I was to retch and retch on my own thoughts until they choked me... (21)In conclusion, intriguing plot, interesting characters, situations described so vividly that you can almost touch them and a magnificent, accessible writing with the power to dazzle you until the end. Yes and a thousand times “yes”. Another writer to admire. Black. White. And we are in the middle, surrounded by many combinations, many possibilities, paths and decisions. Two sides of us coexisting in one body. Perhaps, two people writing these rambling thoughts. Thoughts and more thoughts. Questioning, torturing, haunting.We are in the middle. No king has been defeated, yet Life ironically cries "Checkmate!".* Also in my blog.
—Florencia Brino
A brilliant short story of what the mind is capable of and what its cognitive potential is, of what it can do when its only outlet is itself, from the complexities of the game of Chess to the silly roll of a water drop.So I had something new and different to look at, something different at last for my starved eyes, which clutched greedily at every detail. I observed every fold of those coats, I noticed, for instance, a drop of water dangling from one of the wet collars, and absurd as it may sound, I waited with ridiculous excitement to see if that drop would finally run down the fold of the fabric, or if it would continue to defy gravity and stay there longer – in fact I stared and stared at that drop for minutes on end as if my life depended on it. Then, when at last it had rolled down, I counted the buttons on the coats, eight on one coat, eight on another, ten on the third; then I compared their lapels; my hungry eyes touched, played with, seized upon all those silly little details with an avidity I can hardly describe.Yet in the end we learn that in a game of Chess, as in life, for good or bad a powerful mind is not the only factor to determine a successful outcome.As a side note, the story takes place in Buenos Aires, Argentina which in the early 1900's was one of the most cosmopolitan centres in the world (sometimes even considered the "Paris of South America"), along with New York.I once spend a summer there and you can still see guys on the streets playing Chess against well over 10 guys at the same time.
—Pablo
