I have pushed my pawn, It’s your turn now!

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

‘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.”

19th Century 20th Century Adventure Africa American Asia Booker British Literature Children Classic contemporary Crime Detective Drama Essays fantasy French Literature German Literature Gothic Historical Fiction Horror Humor India Indian Literature magical realism Memoir Music Mystery Nature Netgalley Nobel Prize Non Fiction Novel Novella Philosophy Play Poetry Race Romance Russia Russian Literature School Short Stories War Women

Beautiful Mutants

Photo by – HanumanFilm Media on Pexels.com

“I think its the stench of ….. otherness.”

Last year, I was reading Hot Milk, I had just finished perhaps the first chapter in my room, when rang the bell on the door. I went outside and found an old oppo of mine surprisingly there. We hugged each other and went for a walk, Our ‘walk the talk’ was so arresting in nature that since that day I could not come back to this room so the ‘Hot Milk’ is still brewing on my table half opened… And A scene of the beach from that book, still brewing in my eyes!

I will read that book completely sometime soon, but today I got this book and see, I read it, ninety-odd pages! It was a clawback moment for me, the tax was fully redeemed!

In my short interaction with ‘Hot Milk,’ I was impressed by Deborah’s writing. ‘Beautiful Mutatnts’ was the first novella of the author and it is said that she wrote it when she was 27. I liked this book for its strange newness for me. It is humourous; dark humor you can say. The writing style is quite different and I enjoyed it. In many places, I grinned reading a sentence or a paragraph. Indeed it happened so many times. If this book is not extraordinary, It’s definitely not mediocre. A bold and provocative debut attempt by the author!

“I will tell you something about Lapinski. When she gets a gas bill, she writes all over it with a thick black felt tip, THIS DOES NOT EXIST’ and sends it to the gas board. Her eyebrows meet in the middle.”

Lapinski is a Russian exile, and she does not talk straight. She creates stories and also creates fun. characters of this novel speak in a language that is no less than a riddle and Levy has been able to make them very interesting in her first book. This author has filled me with curiosity to peek into more of her works, I guess!

Leaving you with some lines, these lines gave me a chortle, a gleeful laugh!


“At the beach, we stare at each other through a hole in a stone. We suck all the fear from each other’s eyes and then we look away. He sings,

In a fishing boat
when the light turns blue
you burgled me
and I burgled you.”

19th Century 20th Century Adventure Africa American Asia Booker British Literature Children Classic contemporary Crime Detective Drama Essays fantasy French Literature German Literature Gothic Historical Fiction Horror Humor India Indian Literature magical realism Memoir Music Mystery Nature Netgalley Nobel Prize Non Fiction Novel Novella Philosophy Play Poetry Race Romance Russia Russian Literature School Short Stories War Women