The Thin Book Club 1: Stefan Zweig's "Chess"

I am not a great fan of book clubs. When reading becomes a duty, it starts resembling homework. Ideally, reading a book should be free of time limits and deadlines. It is a unique encounter between the reader and the writer and should be savoured like a meeting with a good friend.

However, I have dreamed of starting a thin book club as there are many great books of ca. 100 pages or at least less than 200. It is time to make this dream into reality in this limited context. I call it a book club only in lack of any other suitable term and would like to think of it as a club for the thin books themselves rather than the readers.

Thin books are easy to keep with you and read anywhere - in a cafe, in the park, on the beach, at a dentist's office while waiting for your turn. Also, a threshold for reading (and rereading) a thin book is much lower than that of a thick book. Hence, I have for years kept my eyes open for thought-provoking thin books. 

One of them is Stefan Zweig's Chess which has also been published with the name Royal Game.

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer who was famous and widely translated in the 1920s and 1930s. I especially love his much thicker memoir The World of Yesterday in which he with insight describes the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Europe that existed before the Nazis destroyed it. 

Zweig himself lost everything and had to escape from Vienna to England where he was treated with suspicion and interrogated as if he was a spy. He and his wife ultimately ended up in Brazil where they were treated well and he came to love this country. 

Despite all this, the grief for having lost everything dear and familiar to him (including a contact with a writer's most important tools, the mother tongue and the related culture) and the horrors of the WW2, the end result of which he could not foresee, caused him and his wife commit suicide on February 22,1942.  

The World of Yesterday was finished in Brazil and Zweig sent it to the publisher before his death. Both it and Chess which was his last book and written in 1941, were published posthumously in 1942. (Interestingly, at least for me living in Portugal, a Portuguese translation of Chess named A Partida de Xadrez was published in September before the original German Schachnovelle came out in December.)

In Chess, the narrator tells about his trip from New York to Argentina by boat. It turns out that there is the chess world champion onboard, an arrogant idiot savant whose only talent is chess. The narrator tries to attract his attention by playing chess with his wife. This only brings in a rich businessman who gets excited by the presence of the world champion and wants to play against him. For a notable sum of money which the businessman is willing to pay, the champion agrees to play against a group of people, giving them 10 minutes to consent on their each move. Predictably, they are losing until a stranger appears and starts giving them instructions. This finally catches the attention of the champion who have just glanced at the game quickly and made his move as he now has to stop to think. With the advice from the stranger, Dr. B., the game ends in a draw. Now the champion himself wants a new game.

I do not want to reveal too much of the book but it later focuses on the posttraumatic story of Dr. B. who tells to the narrator how he acquired his knowledge on chess.

I can only think that these last books were Zweig's testament with which he wanted to express something very important about the effects of the crumbling world order and Nazism. Now that it is happening again, he has become increasingly current.