Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig

Inauspicious as it might seem, I first learned about Stefan Zweig several years ago from a facebook post. A former colleague of mine from a bookstore I worked at more than 20 years ago, who is an avid reader and facebooker wrote some short post praising multiple works of his. I added a bunch of them to my PaperbackSwap wish list and waited. Then at some point I came across his biography of Mary Stuart in a thrift store. I started it and read 100 pages or so, but it didn't really stick, so I set it aside. Eventually, I found myself in possession of a copy of Beware of Pity, I forget exactly how or when -- maybe one of my PaperbackSwap requests panned out; that's how I eventually got Chess Story. In any case, I read it in October of 2017 and was floored. (It made my "other books I really enjoyed" list in the year-end post, but surely would have warranted more notice if in 2017 I hadn't also read the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, which dominated the year, and Curfew, a book that affected me to the point that I bought tickets to fly to Chile two months after finishing it so I could visit some of the locales from the book.)

If we can presume based on the date I added Zweig's books to my wishlist, July 11, 2013 was the day I first heard of Zweig. In retrospect, I'm surprised I hadn't heard of Zweig before. As Goodreads informs us, "Stefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe." He seems like someone I should have been exposed to sometime. Maybe when I worked at the bookstore. Or maybe when I was living in Boston and taking classes at Harvard and hanging out with my husband's art school friends who were into continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, but as far as I recall, Zweig never came up.

Chess Story is brief (a novella, really) but powerful. It also takes a sort of surprising turn that I think is worth exploring. The narrator is mostly an observer of the book's events. As he is boarding a ship from New York to Buenos Aires, he discovers that one of his fellow passengers is the reigning world Chess champion, a young man from Yugoslavia who seems to have no intellect beyond his uncanny ability in chess. The author wants to get to know this young champion to observe monomania up close. In that respect, he gets his wish but not from the expected source. It's the champion's unknown opponent who turns out to be the main subject of the book, and the one truly suffering from monomania. The story of how he got there is incredible.