Off he went, dragged from chess club to cafe, humiliating proud adult amateurs, studying with a minor master in Vienna, bringing glory to his Yugoslavian village. “He did nothing unless specifically told to, never asked a question, did not play with other boys, and undertook no activity that had not been explicitly assigned to him…”īetween chores he sat around “with the vacant look of a sheep at pasture.”īut then he happened upon a game of chess - and found the one narrow sliver of human endeavor in which he was not only capable but brilliant. A Yugoslavian orphan, he was still, at fourteen, counting on his fingers, reading with difficulty. “He’s crisscrossed America from coast to coast playing tournaments and is now off to Argentina for fresh triumphs.”Įven for a chess champion, Czentovic is bizarre. It’s about - or seems at first to be about - the world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic, traveling by boat from America to Argentina. The best showroom for this architectural trick is Chess Story, a novella published after Zweig’s death in 1942. A seemingly insignificant character begins to tell what you expect will be a story of at most a paragraph or two thirty pages later you find yourself immersed in a different book altogether. You tool along in his books, admiring the lively prose, enjoying the tinge of melodrama - and then you come upon a hidden door. Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer from the period just before the second World War, is the master of this dream’s literary equivalent.
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