By David Herman
1 min read
And still the Stefan Zweig revival rolls on. Letters, biographies, Wes Anderson's film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and about a dozen books and collections of stories and essays published in the past four years alone.
The slim collection from Alma Classics, A Game of Chess and Other Stories (£4.99), translated by Peter James Bowman, is a perfect introduction to Zweig because it includes two of his greatest short works, The Invisible Collection and A Game of Chess - better known as The Royal Game.
The Invisible Collection is set in Germany at the height of the inflation of the early 1920s. A Berlin art dealer goes to the provinces to meet an elderly client who he hopes might sell him part of his priceless collection, which includes works by Dürer and Rembrandt. The old man turns out to be blind and Zweig slowly reveals a moving twist that tells us much about the passion for collecting and the context of post-First-World-War Germany brought to its knees by the great inflation.
A Game of Chess is the story of a very different compulsion. On a steamship from New York to South America, the narrator finds out that the world chess champion is on board and, curious, he sets up a game. A spectator, Dr B, intervenes and turns out to be a brilliant amateur chess player for reasons he explains to the narrator before he goes on to challenge the champion himself, reasons that explain why he is fleeing to South America.
At first, these stories seem to be about a civilised, bygone age, a world of passionate art collectors and chess players, provincial hotels and guest-houses on the Riviera, trains and steamships - an ordered world of timetables. But, as you read on, you discover a darker core, as there always is in Zweig. The four tales become accounts of obsession and monomania, which result in madness or (in the case of two of them) suicide.
Dr B, a spectator, turns out to be a brilliant amateur chess player
And indeed, Zweig (left) himself famously ended his life in a double suicide with his young wife in Brazil soon after the publication of The Royal Game, the most powerful story in this collection.