The Royal Game: A Chess Story
£4.70
‘Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game’ Economist
On the deck of a transatlantic ocean liner, a crowd of passengers gathers to watch reigning chess world champion Mirko Czentovic take on a series of amateur challengers. The haughty grandmaster dispatches all of his opponents with ease, until one Dr B steps forward from the crowd―a passionate lover of the royal game who still bears the mental scars of imprisonment by the Nazis in his native Austria. The enigmatic genius reluctantly agrees to challenge Czentovic, but at what cost to his sanity?
Written during the Second World War, The Royal Game was the great Stefan Zweig’s final work―a searing, suspenseful tale of psychological torment and the price of obsession.
Read more
Additional information
| Publisher | Pushkin Press (4 Nov. 2021) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 112 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1782278265 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1782278269 |
| Dimensions | 19.6 x 1.2 x 12.9 cm |
by Летят утки
de gustibus non est disputandum, as the Uzbeks say. I bought this book because a German-speaking Danish friend of mine recommended it to me, and because it has had very good reviews (in Starritt’s 2013 translation) from newspapers that I respect, such as The Economist and The Independent. To me though it seems a dull, unimpressive piece of work, written in a pedestrian style, and badly constructed (the technique where the crux of the story is disclosed in a long monologue by one of the characters strikes me as tiresome, unnatural, and artificial). But lots of people greatly admire Zweig’s writing.