Chess Story by Stefan Zwieg

From my own experience I was well aware of the mysterious attraction of the "royal game," which, alone among the games devised by man, regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift. But is it not already an insult toc all chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, 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 and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all people and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit?

Chess Story tells about a single chess match between masters of the game, held on a transatlantic passenger ship. On one side is Mirko Czentovic, a Slavic savant and world champion whose abilities at the board are belied by his inability to understand the game without said board in front of him. On the other side is Dr. B, whose skills, by contrast, are wholly imaginary: as he tells the narrator, he was held for months, perhaps years, in a hotel room by the Nazis with only a chess instruction book to entertain himself. When he came to the end of it, he began to play chess against himself in his mind. The game he is to play against Czentovic will be the first game of real chess he's ever played in decades, and the first real opponent.

Chess Story is a novel about the Nazis, for one, the way they tried not only to eliminate the lives and livelihoods of their victims, but also their intellectual and imaginary capacity. Dr. B's mental chess game is a way of defeating his captors, and chess turns out to be the perfect tool, discrete but endlessly variable, so that the possibilities never end. But playing against himself turns out to have had deleterious effects on Dr. B's mind. He tells the narrator that he essentially had to create two selves, a black self and a white self, and isolate them from each other so strongly in his mind that each was forced to guess at the strategy of the other, as one would a real chess opponent. Mirko, who turns out to be not such an idiot about everything but the chess board, cannily sees that his opponent is playing every game but the one on the table, and adjusts his strategy accordingly. So, it's about the Nazis, but it's also about the mind, and whether the mind is really all-powerful, or whether it tends toward dissolution in the absence of the practical and the real.

This one felt a little like cheating. At 80 pages, it really is a Chess Story and not a Chess Novel. It has a short story's singularity of impact, and it felt to me even more streamlined and singular than a novella might. And yet, here it is between two covers. I enjoyed the small and colorfully drawn cast of characters; I think the novel works because while Dr. B is at the novel's heart, Mirko is just as interesting, and so are some of the other characters, like the braggart Scottish industrialist who can't let himself lose even to the undisputed world champion. If you're wondering, this is not the guy who wrote Shrek. That's William Stieg. But even still, I enjoyed Chess Story.