Why chess is a perfect game for fiction - KGB chess!

Stuart Evers
Friday August 28 2009
The Guardian
---
The summer of 1972 is a golden one for writers seeking a tumultuous background to their fiction. Kicking off with the breaking of the Watergate scandal, continuing through "Hanoi" Jane Fonda's tour of North Vietnam and ending with the massacre at the Munich Olympics, that summer is stuffed with so many huge international events that a humble game of chess seems rather a distraction. But this was the match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer - and the whole of the cold war world was watching.

The central character in David Szalay's second novel, The Innocent, however, has to content himself with listening on the radio. A former hardliner and former member of the nascent KGB, Aleksandr sets up his battered and broken chess set and moves his little chess pieces according to the increasingly tired voice calling the action from Reykjavik. It's just four pages long, this scene, but Szalay imbues it with a stillness and a tension that is taut and increasingly expressive.

The broken board, the chessmen wrapped in a newspaper reporting a decade-old east v west crisis, the frown on Aleksandr's face as he fails to spot Fischer's error: all of these images, when taken together, perfectly articulate the internal combat waging in Aleksandr's head. His faith in the great experiment is failing, yet chess is there to remind him where his allegiance lies. The section ends with a simple, yet effective, conclusion: Aleksandr is looking at the board, staring at the "silent little pieces of wood whose significant positions are tonight transfixing the world."

Even without the backdrop of political schisms and the spectre of mutually assured destruction, chess is a transfixing game in its own right - especially for writers. It has been the inspiration for countless novels, plays and pieces of short fiction, many of which are collected in a wonderful anthology called The 64-Square Looking Glass. What is it that makes chess such a consistently fascinating subject?

Chess, by its very nature, is a battle between two different thought processes; it gives the novelist the opportunity to go into the players' minds, while retaining an element of plot at the same time. This approach is brilliantly explored in Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw by Thomas Glavnic, a novel as strikingly good as its title. Here, 10 games of chess - which become ever more gripping as Haffner tries desperately to avoid losing - are the springboard to a familial history and an elegy for a disappearing Vienna. It's one of chess's finest novels, sitting comfortably alongside Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense and Paulo Maurensig's The Lüneburg Variation.

More abstractly, chess is attractive to writers as it mirrors the very act of writing itself. Planning ahead, tactics, manipulation are both part of fiction's palate as well as chess's. In both his fiction and his plays, Beckett used the imagery of the chess set, moving his characters around like lowly, articulate pawns. The conclusion of Murphy may be the finest expression of the game's intrinsic link to both art and humanity - "The ingenuity of despair" indeed.

Taking Beckett to its postmodern conclusion, Martin Amis's Money featured a chess game between the central character, the plumply odious John Self, and the spitty, roll-up smoking "Martin Amis". It's an extraordinary scene and one that despite my general loathing of his style and subject matter, I must concede is brilliantly written, controlled and executed. It's the only time where I could see what the fuss was all about, especially at the game's close when "Amis" apologises, as much for creating him as for beating Self at the board.

While Szalay's novel is far from the glitzy literary chicanery of Amis, The Innocent does, like Money, pivot around its respective chess scene. And while Self is playing his creator, Aleksandr is playing out other people's moves as well as his own personal demons. Neither are chess men, yet this is the game they play - for no other has the weight and heft to support such an important part of a novel.

---

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009

Why chess is a perfect game for fiction - KGB chess!

Stuart Evers
Friday August 28 2009
The Guardian
---
The summer of 1972 is a golden one for writers seeking a tumultuous background to their fiction. Kicking off with the breaking of the Watergate scandal, continuing through "Hanoi" Jane Fonda's tour of North Vietnam and ending with the massacre at the Munich Olympics, that summer is stuffed with so many huge international events that a humble game of chess seems rather a distraction. But this was the match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer - and the whole of the cold war world was watching.

The central character in David Szalay's second novel, The Innocent, however, has to content himself with listening on the radio. A former hardliner and former member of the nascent KGB, Aleksandr sets up his battered and broken chess set and moves his little chess pieces according to the increasingly tired voice calling the action from Reykjavik. It's just four pages long, this scene, but Szalay imbues it with a stillness and a tension that is taut and increasingly expressive.

The broken board, the chessmen wrapped in a newspaper reporting a decade-old east v west crisis, the frown on Aleksandr's face as he fails to spot Fischer's error: all of these images, when taken together, perfectly articulate the internal combat waging in Aleksandr's head. His faith in the great experiment is failing, yet chess is there to remind him where his allegiance lies. The section ends with a simple, yet effective, conclusion: Aleksandr is looking at the board, staring at the "silent little pieces of wood whose significant positions are tonight transfixing the world."

Even without the backdrop of political schisms and the spectre of mutually assured destruction, chess is a transfixing game in its own right - especially for writers. It has been the inspiration for countless novels, plays and pieces of short fiction, many of which are collected in a wonderful anthology called The 64-Square Looking Glass. What is it that makes chess such a consistently fascinating subject?

Chess, by its very nature, is a battle between two different thought processes; it gives the novelist the opportunity to go into the players' minds, while retaining an element of plot at the same time. This approach is brilliantly explored in Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw by Thomas Glavnic, a novel as strikingly good as its title. Here, 10 games of chess - which become ever more gripping as Haffner tries desperately to avoid losing - are the springboard to a familial history and an elegy for a disappearing Vienna. It's one of chess's finest novels, sitting comfortably alongside Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense and Paulo Maurensig's The Lüneburg Variation.

More abstractly, chess is attractive to writers as it mirrors the very act of writing itself. Planning ahead, tactics, manipulation are both part of fiction's palate as well as chess's. In both his fiction and his plays, Beckett used the imagery of the chess set, moving his characters around like lowly, articulate pawns. The conclusion of Murphy may be the finest expression of the game's intrinsic link to both art and humanity - "The ingenuity of despair" indeed.

Taking Beckett to its postmodern conclusion, Martin Amis's Money featured a chess game between the central character, the plumply odious John Self, and the spitty, roll-up smoking "Martin Amis". It's an extraordinary scene and one that despite my general loathing of his style and subject matter, I must concede is brilliantly written, controlled and executed. It's the only time where I could see what the fuss was all about, especially at the game's close when "Amis" apologises, as much for creating him as for beating Self at the board.

While Szalay's novel is far from the glitzy literary chicanery of Amis, The Innocent does, like Money, pivot around its respective chess scene. And while Self is playing his creator, Aleksandr is playing out other people's moves as well as his own personal demons. Neither are chess men, yet this is the game they play - for no other has the weight and heft to support such an important part of a novel.

---

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009

Chess and the KGB novel - "an exciting and memorable read"!

Viv Groskop
Sunday August 23 2009
The Observer
---
Spring 1948 and Aleksandr, a KGB major, is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic in the Urals to investigate Anatoly Yudin. A famous pianist in the 1930s, Yudin disappeared during the Second World War and was presumed dead. Now he has resurfaced and has a strange form of amnesia. Or does he? Aleksandr suspects Yudin may be writing anti-Soviet tracts. Does Lozovsky, Yudin's doctor, know something? The story is told by Aleksandr, looking back from 1972 as he begins to see the whole of Soviet history - and the role he has himself played - in a different light.

With Aleksandr, David Szalay, winner of the Betty Trask Prize 2008 for his debut London and the South-East, has created an extraordinary character, a KGB man you can imagine knowing or even being. Aleksandr is an idealist, a "real" communist, who truly believes in the system and wants to do the right thing. Anyone who has seen the German film The Lives of Others will recognise the type: he's a cousin of Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, another Everyman who suddenly finds himself questioning everything he has ever believed.

This, then, is a similar situation in Soviet form. Szalay's trick is to make us feel for Aleksandr and sympathise with his dilemmas, while inserting the odd chilling clue as to what's really going on. ("Turn off his light," he says to the officer guarding a man under interrogation and we suddenly realise the conditions the prisoner has been kept in.) Aleksandr's journalist brother, Ivan, offers a foil to the ideological purity; he is prepared to take risks and sees the flaws in the system - until he becomes a beneficiary of it himself. Over the course of the book, the two brothers swap roles, with Aleksandr becoming more disillusioned and Ivan happily riding the gravy train.

The novel's focus swings dramatically between the two brothers' changing relationship and the fate of Yudin and Lozovsky, until we, like Aleksandr, are no longer sure who's in the right, who is supposedly guilty and who really has done something wrong. The result is not so much a critique of the Soviet system - or of totalitarianism - as a comment on the uncertainty of life, how little we know others or even ourselves.

Woven into the narrative are fascinating accounts of historical moments, seen through the eyes of ordinary Soviets, which gradually affect Aleksandr's mindset: losing to the Germans 3-0 at football in the 1972 European Championship final; Bobby Fischer beating Boris Spassky at the Reykjavik chess championships. When Aleksandr's KGB mentor, a man whom he considers to be as trustworthy and "pure" as himself, is targeted, his world implodes. Meanwhile, there are scenes of quiet, comic desperation from everyday Soviet life. The KGB officer supposed to be intercepting Lozovsky falls asleep at his post. In a communal flat, people find themselves involuntarily registering what their neighbours last had to eat and when they last smoked a cigarette.

This is an exciting and memorable read. Expertly researched, it feels authentic, but wears its learning reassuringly lightly. Anyone who appreciated Martin Amis's Koba the Dread and Orlando Figes's The Whisperers will love it, as will fans of The Lives of Others or Burnt by the Sun. As with both films, the theme of silent, regret-filled horror is beautifully, chillingly captured.

---

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009

Chess and the KGB novel - "an exciting and memorable read"!

Viv Groskop
Sunday August 23 2009
The Observer
---
Spring 1948 and Aleksandr, a KGB major, is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic in the Urals to investigate Anatoly Yudin. A famous pianist in the 1930s, Yudin disappeared during the Second World War and was presumed dead. Now he has resurfaced and has a strange form of amnesia. Or does he? Aleksandr suspects Yudin may be writing anti-Soviet tracts. Does Lozovsky, Yudin's doctor, know something? The story is told by Aleksandr, looking back from 1972 as he begins to see the whole of Soviet history - and the role he has himself played - in a different light.

With Aleksandr, David Szalay, winner of the Betty Trask Prize 2008 for his debut London and the South-East, has created an extraordinary character, a KGB man you can imagine knowing or even being. Aleksandr is an idealist, a "real" communist, who truly believes in the system and wants to do the right thing. Anyone who has seen the German film The Lives of Others will recognise the type: he's a cousin of Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, another Everyman who suddenly finds himself questioning everything he has ever believed.

This, then, is a similar situation in Soviet form. Szalay's trick is to make us feel for Aleksandr and sympathise with his dilemmas, while inserting the odd chilling clue as to what's really going on. ("Turn off his light," he says to the officer guarding a man under interrogation and we suddenly realise the conditions the prisoner has been kept in.) Aleksandr's journalist brother, Ivan, offers a foil to the ideological purity; he is prepared to take risks and sees the flaws in the system - until he becomes a beneficiary of it himself. Over the course of the book, the two brothers swap roles, with Aleksandr becoming more disillusioned and Ivan happily riding the gravy train.

The novel's focus swings dramatically between the two brothers' changing relationship and the fate of Yudin and Lozovsky, until we, like Aleksandr, are no longer sure who's in the right, who is supposedly guilty and who really has done something wrong. The result is not so much a critique of the Soviet system - or of totalitarianism - as a comment on the uncertainty of life, how little we know others or even ourselves.

Woven into the narrative are fascinating accounts of historical moments, seen through the eyes of ordinary Soviets, which gradually affect Aleksandr's mindset: losing to the Germans 3-0 at football in the 1972 European Championship final; Bobby Fischer beating Boris Spassky at the Reykjavik chess championships. When Aleksandr's KGB mentor, a man whom he considers to be as trustworthy and "pure" as himself, is targeted, his world implodes. Meanwhile, there are scenes of quiet, comic desperation from everyday Soviet life. The KGB officer supposed to be intercepting Lozovsky falls asleep at his post. In a communal flat, people find themselves involuntarily registering what their neighbours last had to eat and when they last smoked a cigarette.

This is an exciting and memorable read. Expertly researched, it feels authentic, but wears its learning reassuringly lightly. Anyone who appreciated Martin Amis's Koba the Dread and Orlando Figes's The Whisperers will love it, as will fans of The Lives of Others or Burnt by the Sun. As with both films, the theme of silent, regret-filled horror is beautifully, chillingly captured.

---

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009