Reviews

‘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.’
*EDIT 12/20/21*
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.’

In my initial read of the book I had written that I found some elements to seem overly explanatory, though as Traveller so eloquently pointed out (see comments below), Zweig uses a nested-narrative style and the author and characters point of views are separate, with many of the dot-connecting moments being rational details the narrator would add. Something I enjoy about this website is the ability to connect and discuss books with people and gain a new perspective. Another thing I enjoy is being able to revisit my own thoughts and see how they have changed/developed/etc over the years. Thanks to everyone who has ever engaged on book chat here, it makes for a really fulfilling experience.

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.
4.5/5

¹ 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?’