Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
A short 85 page novella set in 1942 is well worth an afternoon of your time. The way Zweig introduces a whole new character half way through with his own story (with it's own beginning, middle and end) and still packs it all in to less than 90 pages is pretty amazing. I wouldnt say it's the most beautiful prose, but it's very well written, well paced and well constructed story. Lesser writers would take 300-400 pages to tell the same story.
Would be interested to hear other's ideas about the themes in this book.
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>A short 85 page novella
I will now read your book. Novels are just too bloated these days.
>Chess Story
Its literally called 'Chess Novella' originally.
Did the english publishers fear that people dont know what a novella is?
This is the most newbie post I've ever seen in my entire life.
I'm honestly proud of you.
It gives me some serious nostalgia about my 7th grade self going on and on about the use of multiple plot lines in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to anyone that would listen. It blew my itty bitty mind at the time, I never realized such things could be done in literature even though it turned out I had already read quite a few works with such a structure, it was the book that that got my brain to tick over and start looking into and understanding the mechanics of literature and not just read it.
Probably also the reason I got so into structure and big complicated door stoppers.
It is but it’s also really cute too.
Better than 90% of IQfy threads today.
>Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
i had to read this for high school. It's about the prejudice that chess players are stern autists
Read this in one sitting at a bookstore, very enjoyable.
Why hasn’t Zweig taken off with women on TikTok yet, he is perfect for today’s readers
I don't know anything about TikTok women, do they read non-Anglos?
Zweig is mostly read by women, since he is quirky middlebrow
90 pages is 89 and half too much pages
Fun little story about obsession, though most of Zweigs works are reflections on that theme. It's a nicely done novella all round. More people should read Zweig.
I read the introduction after reading the text, and the intro writer actually had a good observation/articulation about the narrative. Basically it's how the story shifts from main story to story-within-a-story in a shrewd way, there's a bit more to it than what I'm saying here. The guy sits on a boat with the narrator and in this setting he goes into flashback mode about his imprisonment.
Also the algebraic notation used in the story is part of the original German text. The Germans had already figured out that Algebraic is the way to go, and the anglos didn't adopt it until late 70s/early 80s. Here's the game that their first encounter with the other guy is based on btw. The position in the story isn't given completely, but the details line up with/match the important moment in this:
https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1006949
>The Germans had already figured out that Algebraic is the way to go, and the anglos didn't adopt it until late 70s/early 80s.
I learned chess from my Dad's books from the 60s and 70s. I still think in the old notation and find 1. P-K4 more natural than 1. e4
There's a line toward the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when one character says to the other, in a flippant, offhand way, "Pawn to King's bloody fourth", because it's understood that every game starts that way.
This is a great novella anon. His other short stories are pretty good too.
Zweig is pretty under appreciateda
He was reasonably popular here until the 2016 invasion when he was deemed reddit by the non-readers because some Wes Anderson film was influenced by him so clearly Zweig is reddit because Anderson is reddit.
He was always just a dumbed down version of Thomas Mann, the far superior writer of the bourgeois tradition.
Thanks for a recommendation. I often find short novels to be really interesting, recently I read “Things” by Georges Perec and in it’s short length it has many interesting choices made to accommodate the main theme
>Read in in German (4th language)
>Don't understand the usage of time
I got filtered hard, still a good story.