Plenty of experts and amateurs alike have ruined their lives, careers, or marriages over chess. However, Zweig doesn’t just understand how much fun chess can be he also understands that it can drive people crazy. Up to now, this book is fun, if only as a kind of sports book, where you see a battle play out on the board. We expect to see a rematch between the champion and this unknown man and we certainly get it, but not before we find out the horrifying reason this man is so good at chess. It’s not a win, but still, being able to reach a stalemate (a tie) against the world champion in anything is an incredible feat.

Then, when a mysterious stranger suddenly starts helping the narrator and his friend, the tension rises because this stranger actually manages to bring the first game to a draw. Zweig narrates events in such a detailed and precise way that you feel like you’re getting a play-by-play account of a grueling game more akin to boxing than a board game. We get the brief background of a chess world champion before moving on to a chess game between the narrator and a friend who team up to play against the champion while on an ocean liner. The first part of Zweig’s novel shows that he clearly understands what makes chess so endlessly engrossing.

But if you’ve actually played the game, you know that it truly is a battle that requires constant and total concentration. After all, it seems like such a quiet game, with two people sitting in silence, occasionally moving pieces on a board and…that’s it. It might surprise you how exciting Austrian novelist’s Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story is if you’ve never played chess.

Chess book stefan zweig