Into their game steps a stranger: the son of a well-connected Austrian family from the old dual monarchy, not unlike Zweig himself, he learned to play the game from a purloined book, while being kept in a bleak place of solitary confinement by his Nazi torturers. Our narrator, about whom we know nothing, acts as a sort of faceless recording device for the boy’s story. No one can beat him, although a macho cutthroat businessman just about goes nuts trying. He is a familiar type in Zweig’s stories: a monomaniac who knows one thing inside and out, and can barely function otherwise. One of them is a world-champion chess master, a crude and uneducated orphan who picked up the game while watching the parson who took care of him play with friends.
Zweig makes it look easy.Ĭertainly, the first thing that strikes me about “Chess Story,” the last piece of fiction Zweig wrote, is how well-constructed it is: a group of men meet on a ship to Europe from New York. While the stories fly by, they contain hidden depths. His stories are clever and unique, the characters are vivid and memorable, and there’s seemingly no extra fat left in the plotting. On the other hand, we certainly shouldn’t forget that Zweig’s prose is worth returning to because, like Proust or Collette, it’s pure pleasure to read him. Like Walter Benjamin, whose suicide may have elevated his philosophical stature a notch, taking one’s own life can also imbue an artist’s work with a tragic shadow that might dim its light a few lumens. Certainly, the end of Zweig’s life, inspired as it was by a feeling that the brutality of the Nazi era had forever snuffed out the radiance of Viennese Enlightened high culture even as Hitler was defeated, poses a certain challenge to those of us still living on the side of civilization: what if he was right? It’s a bit hard not to wonder, though, to what extent his sparkling prose and tight, clever stories are still overshadowed by the details of his death.
And then, he was “rediscovered,” which is all for the good ( although I hadn’t known he was ever forgotten). For the longest time, Stefan Zweig was little-known and much forgotten in the English-reading world.
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