צוויג כותב נפלא. ( )

Chess a.k.a. The Royal Game, is another title that I planned to read during Novellas in November.

It's the fourth story I've read by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)...

• Amok and Other Stories (1922)


• Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927)


• Confusion (1927)

... and I think it's the best of them. Like the others I've read, it was translated by the late Anthea Bell OBE (1936-2018) but you can read an online version by a different translator at this site. (There's no About Page to explain the copyright status of what's on the site, so I hope I haven't inadvertently encouraged piracy.)

At the surface level, Chess is the story of a battle between chessmasters while they are en route to exile in Buenos Aires. The unnamed narrator is excited to learn that the world champion Czentovic is aboard, and he sets up a match against Doctor B. for an avid audience of chess-playing passengers. It's a simple plot, which recounts how Czentovic is manipulated into wanting to play, and the story-within-the-story explains how Doctor B used his time in solitary confinement to learn the moves from great chess matches of the past. The game turns out to be dull because Czentovic takes so long between moves, but the unexpected results bring tension to the story because Czentovic is not a man to take defeat lightly.

Beneath the surface, however, lies complex symbolic characterisation.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/12/20/chess-a-k-a-the-royal-game-by-stefan-zweig-t... ( )

The big failing? Here is that the whole story seems like a set up to contrast the approach of the savant chess world champion and the aristocractic dilettante, and then use it to say something about the Nazi takeover of Germany in the form of the chess game. And it... Doesn't really? So the two parts - the story of the Austrian survivor of Nazi isolation torture and the chess game - feel disconnected to me. If there is intended to be a comparison drawn or a link between the chess champion and the Nazis, what the author chooses to describe reflects worse on the author than the character, imo. It seems to boil down to the chess champion starting from the humblest beginnings and being an ignorant peasant bumpkin who is dedicated to chess but primarily only as a money making tool, having not been brought up with upper class refinements. It's hard not to read him as experiencing something along the lines of "neurodivergence" too - I hesitate to use that term, but people like me certainly existed then and there were ways of understanding them. The author prefers to portray his behaviour entirely negatively. The story of the dilettante's torture is really well told (as is the rest of the story - the writing is great)! But politically there's weirdness in the lauding of someone who presumably was complicit in the austrofascist regime - not in that it's wrong of the story to do so, but that it complicates anything deeper you try and draw from it.

I just felt like I was supposed to come away with something more than I did, like there was something eluding my understanding. Or if I did actually recognise what it was then it was a pretty uncomfortably bad read on the Nazis, that they were stupid and declasse compared to the good old aristocrats of Austria. I think on its own that doesn't sink it - honestly 3 Vs 4 stars was a tossup, the writing is great enough I could go for 4 some days - it just left me a little befuddled at the end. ( )

Short but powerful. Absolutely loved it. Once again,Stefan Zweig doesn't disappoint ( )

This novella, also found under the title [Chess Story] is classic Zweig, a story within a story, in which two men, a chess savant of peasant origins and an educated man with a difficult past, face off across the chess board. Each is in some way trapped within his mental abilities and traumas, one as an orphan with an unusual gift, the other as a refugee from Nazi torture whose mechanisms of survival left their own damage. Highly recommended.

This was Zweig's last book before he and his wife took their own lives in 1942, in despair over exile and its causes. ( )