Book: Chess Story
Author: Stefan Zweig
Reviewer’s Instagram: readwithrebeca
Photo Credit: readwithrebeca
Original Book Review
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. 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.
First published in 1942, Stefan Zweig’s posthumous novella strikes as an incredibly clever piece of literature, where every sentence seems to be meticulously crafted. This passion and pure talent Zweig put in the novella make it deeply engrossing (you won’t be—and I wasn’t—able to put it down). I love it when writers prove how they can easily haunt us without much extravaganza.
Zweig chooses his pawns methodically, and the two chess players introduced in his novella become a reflection of the cruel game called life. He lets you choose your pieces and asks you to do it carefully. You can either end up with some rotten power, ignorance and emptiness or enlightenment, intelligence and suffering.
Sadly, Chess Story is deeply correlated to Zweig’s life story, as he escaped his native home in the 1930s due to the rise of fascism in Europe. Ending up in Brazil, a land he loved, Zweig did not find fulfillment. Chess Story was the last piece he wrote before taking his own life. Since reading this novella, I have been very eager to read his other works. I am excited to pick up The Post Office Girl, Beware of Pity and Brazil: Land of the Future. Long live translators!
