Chess Story

On my physical bookshelf I sort books from left to right - most to least favorite - irrespective of genre or author. It wrecks hell on book series, but it helps me get my thoughts in order when writing these reviews in a weird way. This book went right in the middle, and that feels correct; I think this is the most neutral I've ever felt about a book.

There's nothing wrong here. There is a story with a beginning, middle and end, a large enough cast of characters with distinct personalities, and a central conflict. And while I have a lot of experience with novellas of this length, I couldn't really get into this one. It felt too short, but at the same time I don't know what could have been done to lengthen it without causing the story to suffer. Ironically, there was a passage in the middle that felt like it was dragging on for too long, but looking back on it, that passage involved a character describing a very long and very boring imprisonment, so maybe that was the point.

This is a decent, short genre palate cleanser. If you've been bogged down in fantasy or sci-fi or thrillers for too long and want to give yourself a quick break from all that, maybe pick this one up.

Was it Piaget who came up with the idea that we learn to think and to speak by arguing? I can't find confirmation on the web but I, at some point in my life acquired this factoid, that our internal dialogues lie behind our civilization.

As a chess player, I have always thought of chess as a disease, like obsessive compulsive disorder only with flair and an intellectual pedigree. It does have the advantage over, say not stepping on cracks and thus not breaking your mother's back,of requiring a relationship only one severely constrained by rules and boundaries--not that all relationships aren't constrained by habit and culture to a greater extant than we are usually aware.

This is the story of two men who retreat into chess--one from his own inborn dullness, the other from solitary confinement. The first seem barely capable of any relationship at all. The other has his relationships forcibly stripped away by the Nazis leaving only his sparring with evil interrogators bent on breaking him. The first has only chess in his life while the second can forsake the chess disease and return to the real world (which he does by being willing to lose the game.)

Zweig, himself on the run from the Nazis, in the solitary confinement of exile in South America, wrote this (in German) before committing suicide. Seen as an explanation, (what else are we to do?) rather than rationally attempt to convince the dullard world to give up the disease of constant warfare, he'd rather quit the world altogether. He was a Freudian and Freud himself was pessimistic about humankind's future, postulating a death instinct.

I, however will be spending the afternoon playing chess in the park.

I'm not able to rate this novella by any means. It's only about 70 sites but i think its complete meaning is out of my scope. Zweig finished this work in February of 2018 in Brasil and kills himself and his wife only a few days later on. On the day of his suicide, he sent 4 copies of this novella to different publishers. He lived in exil, expelled from Austria which has been occupied by the Nazis and sufferring from depression. These background facts lead to a lot of interpretation of his last work. For instance, if the chess fight between the two main characters represents the fight between fascists and democrats. At the end of the version I read my book, 10 sites of interpretations were appended, trying to give a broad overview of existing interpretation. Most of them try to figure out in which dimension his last work is autobiographic, if he announces his own suicide or his lack of hope for humanity. And most importantly, what the chess game is referencing to. I'm not able to answer these questions after the book. I only got some ideas by reading the interpretations. But maybe this is the beauty of his last work: no clear answers, much room for interpretation, making the reader think.