Books: “Chess” by Stefan Zweig

Book of the month @ BooksActually, and a really great choice given that the world had come off the chess frenzy of “The Queen’s Gambit.” It was last month’s book choice, and here I must confess there is a small collection of books that require book entries that are piling up on my desk, and an even bigger ‘read me’ tower.

What is wonderful about Chess is you can read it in an evening – a whole story complete, without the guilt of having just binged watched an entire Netflix series. Yet despite its thin spine, it goes deep into the human psyche.

An Austrian-Jewish accountant is held in total isolation and interrogated by the Gestapo for information on hidden investment funds of prominent Austrians during WWII. Day after day, his mind weakens, poisoned by his own voice which fills him with lonely despair. While waiting in the interrogation room, four months into isolation, his eyes fall upon the rectangular shape his soul seeks. Stealing the object that was in a soldier’s jacket pocket, the prospect of being relieved from his own dark thoughts makes him tremble. But the Fates prove cruel: the book is a record of championships chess matches. Chess! – a game of minds that is played by two, not one.

What happens after is pure determination, a testament of mind over matter, of our instinct to survive. But the cost of monomaniac pursuit is high, and chess, like Ahab’s white whale, is such vessel of obsession.  

As we grapple with Covid, at times being confined within our homes, the effects of social isolation are all too real and raw. His description of being in the same room, staring at the same walls, into the same stains and cracks, was enough for me to feel imprisoned within my own walls. But my walls are lined with books – and I am able to be transported, anywhere, anytime. Walking away from a chess match is as easy as closing a book. It is much too easy to judge the desperate as crazy.

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

“It was an obsession against which I had no defense; from morning to night I thought of nothing but bishops and pawns, rooks and kings, a and b and c, checkmate and castling. All my being and feeling drove me to the chequered square. My delight in playing turned to a lust for playing, my lust for playing into a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenetic fury that filled not only my waking hours but also came to invade my sleep. I could think of nothing but chess, I thought only in chess moves and chess problems; sometimes I woke with my forehead perspiring and realized that I must still have been unconsciously playing even as I slept, and when I dreamed of people I did so exclusively in terms of the movement of the bishop, the rook, the knight’s leaps forward and back.”