Nabokov cum Chess
While I was finishing up student manuscripts (until the next deadline), I decided to read something Completely Different from their genre novels. I grabbed Vladimir Nabokov's The Defense, also known as The Luzhin Defense, from my I've-Really-Been-Hoping-To-Get-To-It pile. It fit the bill very nicely, a carefully constructed metaphorical novel, with psychological overtones and details; larded with complex sentences and lengthy descriptions; and it's about chess.
This is, by the way, the book from which the movie The Luzhin Defence was derived. I have not yet seen it, but I was amused by the trailer clips, which made it clear that young Luzhin defeated his father by playing an opening trap that I once used regularly in tournaments.
I am a great admirer of Nabokov's lectures (now sadly only partly in print) on "World Literature" (which means non-Russian Europe) and Russian Literature, but I'm very under-read on his novels. I do love his narrative style, though, with indirect sentences like the one that begins, only begins, Only when they were already in the front hall and everyone was taking leave of the others in a kind of dress rehearsal, for they all took leave of one another again in the street, though they all had to go in the same direction...
This novel traces the life of a child chess prodigy, who succumbs, as many have, to madness. It too sadly reminded me of Morphy, Steinitz and Fischer - not to mention several of my college friends who succumbed to the drug of chess - and made for a depressing read. Ah, well. But Nabokov gets two things very right about the experience of playing chess intensely. First, that once one really understands the game it is played in the imagination, not on the board, and the pieces can really be a distraction. (This is beautifully alluded to in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, when at a supreme moment all the pieces disappear from the board.) Second, that in the aftermath of a tournament, one sees chess in everything. One analyses a roomful of people on the basis of who can "take" whom, and what "moves" are possible; and Thor help you if you are looking at a tile floor or a large multi-paned window.
He also describes a kind of paranoia I've seen in chess players - and who knows if the game is a cause or effect or artifact? - in which the world is seen as the chessboard, and there is a presumed opponent behind it all.
I'll admit that I admired this novel a bit more than I actually enjoyed it, but intellectual pleasure is nice when you can get it. The one actual criticism I'd have of it is that he goes rather too far with the vagueness of the description of Luzhin's mental processes. It's quite effective, and portrays something that happens to us all (and which Kafka was frequently trying to portray), which is that the mind slips gears. We are suddenly doing something we oughtn't, and can't imagine why we allowed this to get started; or we know that our To Do List has a number of pressing items on it, but somehow we just forget... The problem is that after 50 pages or so, this technique gets a bit thin. After you've read, as I have, more than a dozen books written with this effect, well, you're not experiencing anything new.
So, highly recommended, with such caveats as may appear above.
CBsIP: House Where a Woman, Lori Wilson
The Chess Garden, Brooks Hansen
Dancing Naked, William Tenn
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Ralph D. Sawyer
The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction, Denys Johnson-Davies, ed.
Crimea 1854-56, The War with Russia from Contemporary Photographs, Lawrence James
The War: from the Landing at Gallipoli to the Death of Lord Raglan, W. H. Russell
Coyote Waits, Tony Hillerman