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.

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 "The Defense," and Stefan
Zweig's novella "The Royal Game." We can now add a third: Paolo
Maurensig's "The Lueneburg Variation."

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.

Perez-Reverte's sophisticated and entertaining novel "The Flanders
Panel" is a multilevel mystery story concerning a valuable 15th-
century Flemish painting, The Game of Chess, and a young art
restorer named Julia who is working on the painting in present-day
Spain. In The Game of Chess, two noblemen play chess while a
woman in the background reads a book. Julia, having X-rayed the
picture prior to restoring it for sale at auction, has discovered a
Latin inscription that had been painted over, presumably by the
artist himself: QUIS NECAVIT EQUITEM, "Who killed the
knight?"

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 

Diagram:
White: Kc4, Qe1, Rb6, Rb5, Bf1, Nb1; pawns - a6, c6, c3, d2, e4, f2; 
Black: Ka4, Qc2, Rc1, Bc8, Nb8, Nd1; pawns - a5, a7, b7, d7

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 powerfullly 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 thisa 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 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.


 [More information: 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)]

Copyright 1998 Burt Hochberg. All Rights Reserved.