‘People and events don’t disappoint us, our models of reality do’
What is your favorite game? Chess? No. Then what?
I tell you mine.
It’s ‘kabbadi’ . My favorite game is ‘kabbadi’. Have you never heard this name? Ah! it’s a traditional game played in India for many centuries. Now it’s being glamorized. That’s a piece of good news. You can google it.
But chess!
Chess is no less exciting. It is said chess has its origin in my country. I know how to play it. If you write e4 or Rxa6 on a piece of paper, I can understand what it means on the chess board. I can also fundamentally understand if a chess player is the current ‘world chess champion’, what does it mean? Don’t you know the name of Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen? Haven’t you seen their mental caliber? How much energy, years of practice, and mental discipline is required to become a world chess champion, I can only imagine it. I feel that no man can defeat a presiding world champion by practicing this game just for four to six months, especially when his practice is performed without a board. Just inside the head!
That is impossible!
A hare-brained idea!
But writers can make anything possible. This author perhaps has some prodigious aptness for turning an ordinary event into a bewildering tale. This was my second try with Zweig. In the first one, I witnessed the extraordinary portrayal of the inner conflict of a child in Burning Secret, which made me an instant fan. And here after this tale… the fandom carries on!
A sumptuous ocean liner is heading toward Buenos Aires. wealthy people, extravagant salons, and a world chess champion among the passengers! A man talks to the captain of the ship and arranges a chess match with the champion, but this man is not at par to play with the champion. And then there appears an intriguing and mysterious man from amongst the crowd, who helps the man in the game and soon all people witness that the beads of sweat break out … on the forehead of the champion! The champion is perplexed by the moves on the board!
Who is this mysterious man and what is his story?
You can see that this premise is extremely ordinary, but I am amazed at how the author made it an unforgettable tale. I loved those parts of the story most when the mysterious man tells his story inside the prison. The author has turned that claustrophobic situation of a prisoner into a sprawling perusal for me!
A man, aloof from the world, sometimes makes his own world like a termite. For me, these lines are the synopsis of this story,
“For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termite-like.”
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