Chess Stories

by

Nicki Leone

“Is that possible?” asked Cesar. “Can you really judge the character of a person by the way he behaves when playing?”

“I think you can,” replied Munoz.

“In that case, what do you think of the person who thought up this, bearing in mind that he did so in the fifteenth century?”

“I’d say” –Munoz was looking at the painting, absorbed—“I’d say these was something ‘diabolical’ about the way he played chess.”

—from The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte

My dad taught me to play chess. He had a cheap cardboard chessboard that folded in half, and a carved wooden box for the pieces. The box was a present from far flung relatives in India—it was ornately decorated with vines and flowers. The chess pieces were also wooden, but they didn’t come with the box. They were from his father, an Italian, and I think had been carved by his own grandfather, so they were several generations old. One of the rooks was chipped, but otherwise they lived safe in their lovely box, which still sits on top of the old board on a shelf in my dad’s study.

It was when I was old enough to reach the shelf with the box and its pieces that Dad decided I was old enough to learn to play. One summer afternoon, just after dinner, he set the board up on the front porch table, and began to patiently teach me how to move all the pieces. We played several times a week that entire summer. At first, Dad helped  by pointing out the implications of my uncertain moves, but gradually he became quieter and less inclined to lose any advantage. Our matches began to take longer and longer. By the end of the summer, I was winning the occasional game. Even at that age, I liked to win. So did my dad, and it was my mother who would come out on the porch after hours had passed to remind both of us that it was just a game.

I took to chess easily, liking the absorption and focus that came from attempting to find patterns among a myriad of possibilities. Although to this day I am a very amateurish player—still inclined to be too hasty in my decisions, and too afraid to sacrifice any of my important pieces—I still find it relaxing, perhaps even seductive, to get lost in a game. When I left for college years later, one of the items I took along was a little cheap folding magnetic chess set, and I have never been without a chess set since. 

It wasn’t until I was about to graduate from college that I realized there was more to chess than logic and problem-solving. That what was for me an exercise in saving the queen was for others a game steeped in symbolism and mystery. That was the year a couple of computer geeks created Deep Blue—the computer that would almost a decade later become the first machine to defeat a Grand Master at chess and raise serious speculation on the nature of artificial intelligence and what it means to be a thinking being. It was the year I discovered that proficiency at chess was considered important training for medieval Irish kings and that the game was played in some form on every continent on the planet. It was also the year that I first read Katherine Neville’s fantastic novel, The Eight (Ballantine; $14.95). By the end of that breathlessly exciting and mysterious story I had a new fetish—fiction about chess. 

Neville’s book, not at all dated even though it was published in 1988 and even though it relies a little bit on the antique computers of the day, is the novel I suggest to people who were looking for something to read after the DaVinci Code. It is a treasure hunt story, a brainy one about the search for a secret and beautiful chess set once owned by Charlemagne and said to contain all sorts of mystical knowledge within its ornate carvings. To this day, it is hard for me to resist such stories, especially if they are about chess sets or chess games—such wonderful devices for hiding secret codes and obscure, magical artifacts. Arturo Perez-Reverte uses chess to wonderful effect this way in his novel The Flanders Panel (Harvest; $14), in which the key to a murder can only be solved by reconstructing a chess game played by two sinister figures on a 15th century painting. And the incomparable Dorothy Dunnett found chess to be the perfect structure on which to build her entire “Lymond Chronicles” (Vintage; $15.95 each)–all six volumes (over seven hundred pages each) of them.  The books are so intricate, so intelligent, so layered and so addictive that although I count them among my favorite novels, I have never dared to re-read them. The first time I innocently picked up the first in the series, The Game of Kings, I found myself so consumed it almost caused a divorce. I simply don’t remember much about the month of June, 2003, except the occasional complaint in the background, “Aren’t you done with those books yet?”, which I would ignore.

           

But while the antiquity of the game, and its many euphemisms (‘the royal game’, ‘the game of kings’) makes for great adventure story plots and high romance tales, (not to mention charmingly creepy fairy tales of little girls who get lost in looking-glass worlds) there is a darker side to chess. It is, after all, a game of duality—black vs. white, good facing evil, angels battling demons. If ever there was a perfect metaphor for the inner conflict that drives all literature, chess is it. Vladimir Nabokov proved it so in his novel The Defense (Vintage; $14), the story of a chess master who goes mad when he meets his match in an unpredictable opponent who has constructed a different kind of reality around the game than his own—who is, in effect, playing by different rules. Paolo Maurensig wrote what is possibly the most frightening chess drama ever in his novel The Luneberg Variation (Henry Holt; $11)—a murder mystery in Vienna that reaches back to the days of Nazi occupation and a deadly game where the stakes are horribly vicious.

                     

And then there is Stefan Zweig, whose intense little novel, Chess Story, has been republished by The New York Review of Books ($16.95) this year as part of their program to reprint lost and forgotten classics. The book is only eighty-four pages long, but put on a scale against all my Dorothy Dunnetts, and I think it would tip them with its sheer psychological intensity.

Originally published under the title The Royal Game in 1942, Zwieg’s last novel was one of the  most popular in his long literary career. He never knew this, however, having fled to Brazil from his home in Vienna on the eve of the Nazi takeover. He sent the manuscript to his publisher in February of 1942 and within days was dead—having committed suicide with his wife. The story is a brief one, describing an encounter between an arrogant and unlikable Grand Master of the game and a quiet, unassuming man who happen to be aboard the same cruise ship and become involved (or perhaps one might say “entangled”) in a game. The Grand Master has never lost a game, his opponent has never been known to win one, and yet they sit opposite each other in a battle that rocks the foundations of both men. The Grand Master’s weakness is that he needs to see the pieces to be able to play. His mysterious opponent’s weakness is that he plays best with his eyes shut and the game played out in his head (the technical term in chess parlance is playing “blind”). What happens when two such opposite personalities meet over the board? They repel each other—violently. And the game ends in a draw.

Zweig’s story is not so much an exploration into the philosophical implications of chess as it is a contemplation on the nature of human endurance. How the anonymous man learned to play the game—and to play the game as he does, in his mind, as if he were his own opponent—is a brief but chilling part of the story, a tale of survival during a long and frightening isolation: “My awful situation was forcing me to at least try to divide myself into a Black Me and a White Me in order not to be rushed by the horrendous nothingness around me,” the player relates to the narrator who has become, reluctantly, his confessor. It was an absurd thing to attempt, but then the man was in an absurd and horrifying situation. Surrounded by nothing, the only solid reality is in his mind. A game of theoretical chess would be disastrous.

I get the feeling that chess is no longer so popular in this day and age as it has been in the past. It demands quiet, deliberation, intense focus and discipline, and we live in a noisy, hasty, rather undisciplined culture. Plus the idea that one can make oneself mad by playing, or even thinking too hard about chess is not a comfortable one, and it is perhaps the reason that my current set—with pieces shaped like Confederate and Union soldiers—is only rarely used now. Like Nabokov, Maurensig and Zweig, I can’t shake the feeling that chess is more than “just a game.”


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program "Let's Read" on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of three dogs and two cats. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it