From the Bookshelf of On Paths Unknown…

Chess Story

Stefan Zweig

Start date: December 7, 2021

Discussion: LET'S KEEP IT SHORT

Why we're reading this: This story contains ripe fodder for discussion, and would be a good Austrian addition to our around-the-w…more
[close] This story contains ripe fodder for discussion, and would be a good Austrian addition to our around-the-world list.

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LET'S KEEP IT SHORT

Stefan Zweig's Chess Story
By Traveller · 43 posts · 60 views

last updated Feb 02, 2023 08:22AM

H.Murakami, "Cream", "With the Beatles" , " The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection "
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last updated Dec 29, 2021 06:57PM

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What Members Thought

Feb 02, 2015 Seemita rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, for_legacy, europe, novella, translated, austria

"Wanting to play chess against yourself is a paradox, like jumping over your own shadow."

But what fun is life if words like manic, insanity, paradox and contradiction are not put to test once in a while? Even at the cost of years of discipline and rationality?

Stefen Zweig surely put his own constructs up the wall when he created this ingenious piece of art. Yes, it was pure art; outrightly splendid form of art that overwhelms the realms of conventional thinking and forces the mind to stretch its ...more

66 likes · Like · see review

Jun 19, 2014 Viji (Bookish endeavors) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: stefan-zweig

Just one word-INTENSE. That's what comes to my mind when I've finished reading my third Zweig. It was like I couldn't breathe. The three books were different in many ways,but all of them were intense,and not in a mild way.
I was expecting this story to begin in a train since that was the first scene in the other two. But no.. This is much different.! It begins in a ship.!! I don't know chess,so I can't make any comment on that,but like the narrator I'm interested in monomaniacs,those rare people ...more

13 likes · Like · see review

Jun 21, 2014 Jan rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20th-century-mid, literature-german

We can thank Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ for contributing to the ‘rediscovery’ the world's most popular writer of the 1920s and 1930s. Stefan Zweig was the son of a wealthy Jewish Viennese textile magnate, received his doctorate in Philosophy in 1904 and wrote blockbuster stories that were translated into 30 languages and made into more than 40 films.

Zweig was a freethinker, non-political, a pacifist and socially active with top writers, artists and composers of the time. He intro We can thank Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ for contributing to the ‘rediscovery’ the world's most popular writer of the 1920s and 1930s. Stefan Zweig was the son of a wealthy Jewish Viennese textile magnate, received his doctorate in Philosophy in 1904 and wrote blockbuster stories that were translated into 30 languages and made into more than 40 films.

Zweig was a freethinker, non-political, a pacifist and socially active with top writers, artists and composers of the time. He introduced Dali to Freud and served with Rilke in the War Archive and worked with Joyce to translate A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Italian.

Chess Story or The Royal Game was written just days before his suicide (with his wife) in 1942. The book can be interpreted in a number of ways. It is clearly a story of obsession (Zweig met weekly while he lived in London with fellow Viennese exile, Sigmund Freud) and his stories have psychological insights about troubled minds.

Or the book could be seen as an allegory about the World War. Czentovic, the reigning world champ, is described as narrow-minded, with a vulgar greed, ignorant in every field of culture, arrogant, insensitive and brutish, clumsy and grotesque, yet because of a monomaniac intensity he is able to defeat much more cultured intellectuals.

After he lost to Dr. B., a highly cultured lawyer who works for the old establishment (the Hapsburg royal family and the Catholic Church) but who had a psychological breakdown following interrogations by the Gestapo, Czentovic knocks all the pieces off the chess board, but takes note of the fragile mental state of his opponent and exploits it to his advantage in the next game.

Zweig describes chess as a game where there is no chance, only calculation and in this case the plodding stolid player prevails. Zweig’s great success as a writer could have come from his tight pace as well as from his reliance on psychology – the story moves quickly and you can sense the unraveling.

So why did Zweig do himself in when he had landed safely just outside of Rio de Janeiro? There are lots of possible explanations, but no answers. We know Zweig was cosmopolitan, and committed to Europe’s heritage of humanism.

At the end he wrote 'It is over. Europe is finished, our world destroyed. Now we are truly homeless.' By ‘we’ I don't think he mean just the Jews; Zweig meant everyone who had lived for the arts, for scholarship, and for humanism. In 1942, he could not have known the final outcome of the War, but it would have been a very pessimistic time for a man like him.

Maybe the isolation he experienced in Brazil relative to the Europe he knew and loved was similar to the intolerable isolation he described in great detail that drove Dr. B. mad.

A very readable book, some describe it, along with Nabokov's The Defense, as the two best works of fiction on chess.
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Jan 22, 2022 Amy (Other Amy) rated it really liked it

Shelves: in-translation, story-in-a-story, 1001-boxall, around-the-year, 1001-done, 4-stars-loved-it, library-i-love-you, by-its-cover, study-of-evil, x-tree-book

All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind. 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.

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May 05, 2019 Phil J rated it really liked it

A great novella that leaves me with questions.

1. Why is Czentovic so great at chess and so mediocre at other things related to civilization? Does he represent a new, thuggish, commercialized element in the world?
2. Why is it important that Dr. B was imprisoned in a nice hotel and not a concentration camp?
3. What does the "analysis paralysis" mentality represent besides chess? Is it the byproduct of being interrogated or treated as a non-person?

This is my favorite type of reading- the facts of th ...more

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Jun 07, 2024 amaldae rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: z-2024, short-stories-novellas

I've seen a superb performance inspired by this book. I wish I'd have taken notes because my prevailing feeling after reading the source material is incredulity. ...more

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