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. Louis Public Library.It might surprise you how exciting Austrian novelist’s Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story is if you’ve never played chess. For more information please email: on-street parking is available, as well as paid lots adjacent to Kingside Diner and at the Schlafly branch of the St.

Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments are provided. The games they engage in become an allegory for the contest between a totalitarian will to power and the extravagantly overgrown life of the pre-War Austro-German intelligentsia.įree admission for WCHOF members. Today, Zweig is best known for his memoir, The World of Yesterday, and for a sensibility that inspired Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. The narrative focuses on a series of matches between a brilliant and monomaniacal chess master, and a lawyer who learned to play chess entirely in his head. The five stories, which span Zweig’s career, are sophisticated and suspenseful portraits reflecting the intellectual culture of prewar Germany and the bleakness of WWI. The Royal Game is Zweig’s final achievement, sent to his American publisher only days before his death in 1942.

At the height of his literary career, he was the most translated European writer in the world, whose death made the front page of the New York Times. Rediscover the work of Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer Stefan Zweig.

The chess player zweig