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From the Archives... Since it came online many years ago, ChessCafe.com has presented literally thousands of articles, reviews, columns and the like for the enjoyment of its worldwide readership. The good news is that almost all of this high quality material remains available in the Archives. The bad news is that this great collection of chess literature is now so large and extensive – and growing each week – that it is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate it effectively. We decided that the occasional selection from the archives posted publicly online might be a welcomed addition to the regular fare. Watch for an item to be posted online periodically throughout each month. We will update the ChessCafe.com home page whenever there has been a “new” item posted here. We hope you enjoy From the Archives... Perspectives by Burt Hochberg The Fiction Gambit No other game has inspired writers to the extent that chess has. There is the occasional interesting work of fiction on other games - Walter Tevis's novel about a pool player, The Hustler, comes immediately to mind - and innumerable novels and stories of popular fiction on poker, gambling, and various sports. But among games, only chess has inspired works of sufficient substance to be called literary masterpieces.
Maurensig's short novel appeared first in Italy in 1993 and in a masterly English translation by Jon Rothschild in 1997. It followed by a few years the English publication of another interesting foreign chess novel, The Flanders Panel, by Arturo Perez-Reverte, which was published in Spain in 1990 and in a deft English translation by Margaret Jull Costa in 1994. The two authors have used chess in strikingly different ways to achieve their fictional purposes, and with very different results.
Her curiosity provoked, Julia asks her friend Alvaro, an art historian, to find out what he can about the people in the painting. Alvaro learns that one of the players was a duke, that the lady was his consort, and that his opponent was his knight, possibly also the lady's lover, and later the victim of a murder. Julia, persuaded by the inscription that the chess position depicted in the painting holds clues to the knight's murder - one of the players is holding a knight, which has obviously just been captured--recruits a local chess master, Munoz, to analyze the game. Soon Alvaro is found dead, possibly murdered. It begins to appear that this new presumed crime, like the old one, is somehow connected to and explainable by the chess game in the picture. The position is a complicated and very unrealistic middlegame:
By means of retrograde analysis Munoz makes certain deductions about the position and then proceeds to predict the likely forward course of the game, move by move. But someone else is also "playing" this game, communicating his moves to Julia and Munoz, each move not only signifying a threat to Julia and her friends but also revealing more about the 500-year-old murder. The author's use of chess to unite several plot strands as well as murders that occurred centuries apart is brilliantly conceived. The chess itself, however, is more than a little artificial. By making the game and the moves specific, the author set himself a task - linking the particular moves of a game to occurrences in the plot - that is rarely if ever successful. Perhaps the most famous example, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, works fine as a dream-adventure that takes place on a chessboard, but the chess game it's based on is unsound and almost nonsensical (since Carroll knew chess well, it may have been his intention to portray the game as it might appear in a dream). The only successful example I know is Poul Anderson's fantasy short story The Immortal Game, in which the author has imagined the famous Anderssen-Kieseritsky game as an actual battle in which warriors, helpless to do otherwise, move and interact precisely as the pieces did in that game. Lack of specificity contributes greatly to Nabokov's The Defense, to Zweig's The Royal Game, and to Maurensig's The Lueneburg Variation. Because the author in each of these works is able to describe the crucial chess scenes powerfully without reference to actual moves, the reader needs no more than the most rudimentary chess knowledge to understand what's happening on the board and how it is affecting the players. The Lueneburg Variation is a work of literary quality on the same plane as Zweig's The Royal Game. Like its classic forebear, it's the story of a man scarred by wartime experience and saved, in a way, by chess. The bare outline of the story is this a wealthy elderly man named Frisch is found dead in his garden, near a topiary made up of chess pieces. On his desk is a strange chess set made of bits of cloth. The pieces - buttons with chess symbols scratched on them - are arranged in a complex middlegame position. What caused Frisch's death? In flashback we learn that Frisch is a master player, an avid collector of chess literature, and the editor of an internationally respected chess magazine. On those days when he goes to his office in Vienna, he plays chess on the train with a colleague. One day a young man identifying himself as Mayer intrudes on their game. Mayer recognizes the opening as the complicated Lueneburg Variation, in which Black sacrifices a knight for two pawns and a strong attack. He claims to have had consistent success with the variation, though Frisch has been trying to refute it in the pages of his magazine for years. His interest piqued, Frisch permits the young man to tell him his story. It is the story of how he learned chess from a mysterious man named Tabori, and eventually it is the story of Tabori himself and his fateful link to Frisch. You will have to discover for yourself what has led to the meeting on the train and Frisch's death. I will leave you with a passage from Maurensig's book that I feel certain will appear in all future anthologies of chess writing: "Those who don't play chess may tend to think of it as a tedious game best suited to idle eccentrics and the elderly - people with vast patience and plenty of time to waste. "This is only partly true, for chess also requires uncommon energy and childlike mental vivacity. If players are sometimes portrayed as old men with furrowed brows, that is merely a symbolic depiction of an activity that consumes days, years, and even lifetimes in a single, unquenchable flame. Players relish the paradoxical compensation: time is forever frozen in a loop of the eternal present, while life away from the board comes to seem unbearably fast-paced. They therefore constantly seek to rediscover that state of grace, that nebulous yet limpid condition of dominion, that comes from concentrating the mind on the game. Boredom? The chess player doesn't know the meaning of the word." [The Luneberg Variation, by Paolo Maurensig, Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1997, $19; The Flanders Panel, by Arturo Perez-Reverte, Bantam Books 1996 (paperback $11.95), Harcourt Brace 1994 (hardcover)] This article first appeared at ChessCafe.com in May 1998. Copyright 1998 Burt Hochberg. All Rights Reserved. |
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Although novels and stories in which chess plays a significant role
are plentiful, until now there have been only two undisputed
masterpieces Vladimir Nabokov's novel 
Perez-Reverte's sophisticated and entertaining novel
