Old Friends and Dear Life

When I arrived home today, this stack, photographed a couple of days ago, had toppled to the floor, as I knew it would.   That's Charles Baxter's Saul and Patsty on the bottom of the pile and the Penguin Selected Essays of Montaigne on the top.  Over there on the right are the Journals of Thoreau, purchased last August at the Strand; James Wood's The Fun Stuff was the anchor of this pile until he failed me and leaned in, as the madmen are saying. Sometimes my book piles fall over in the middle of the night, which isn't optimal.  But I've treated my books this way for half a century--as sturdy blocks of prose and poetry to be acquired and read and kept close at hand, as disorganized as one's own mind, tottering and bending until the forces of gravity spew them underfoot.  I'm a poor carpenter, and the "built in" bookshelves I put up around the house always end up looking like gerryrigged Republican redoubts in Kansas or the scalene  national boundaries of Azerbaijan.

However, thanks to today's crash I was able at long last to lay my hands on some old friends I haven't seen in months. Amidst the chaos I chanced upon Donald Hall's The Museum of Clear Ideas, published in 1993, and containing his wonderful poem "Baseball"--remember it?  Nine innings of verse explaining our national pastime to Kurt Schwitters, "Merz-poet and artist, / whose work was clothing, office, bedroom, /and carapace..." Don Hall of New Hampshire is, perforce, a fan of the Red Sox, which I am not, but he wrote delicate and nostalgic poems about the greatest sport ever invented, tender in their evocation of warm July evenings spent at the ball yard, poems that sing in the way Roger Angell's great essays on baseball sing--of youth and hope and the melancholy of loss.  Don Hall--a wonderful straight up no chaser American name--who I heard read "Kicking the Leaves" in person years ago, wrote the poems in this fine book while the love of his life and fellow poet (perhaps even a better poet) Jane Kenyon was still alive, and since I'm a sentimental sort, I'd stacked Jane's book Otherwise next to Don's so that they could lie together on the floor amidst the scattered debris of history and philosophy.  Here's the eponymous "Otherwise" in case you've forgotten it:

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might 
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill                                      
to the birch wood.
All morning I did 
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and 
planned another day
just like this day. 
But one day, I know, 
it will be otherwise.


And there, toppled under my reading chair, is a gorgeous red Harvard paperback, purchased at the Tattered Cover in Denver in the 1990's--Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith by Octavio Paz.  I haven't looked into this book in years. The cover shows Sister Juana wearing a Sacred Heart of Jesus the size of a pizza plate; inside, Paz has provided biography, historical context, literary criticism and a subtle psychological reading of the seventeenth century nun's view of "the world as hieroglyph."  In Sor Juana's own words: "I have sought to veil the light of my reason, along with my name, and to offer it up only to Him who bestowed it on me, and He knows that none other was the cause of my entering into religion not withstanding that the spiritual exercises and company of a community were repugnant to the freedom and quiet I desire for my studious endeavors."  It could have been otherwise.  Sor Juana plays a little fast and loose with the facts for if Paz is to be believed what she wanted wasn't the convent at all, nor the sacred Groom whom all nuns marry, but simply to be left alone to write.

Poor John Berryman has finally lost his high perch--this copy of The Dream Songs, in hardcover, a first edition, cost me ten bucks in 1969: "Your face broods from my table, Suicide."  There's The Russian Revolution (R. Pipes/886 pages) crushing the diminutive Selected Garcia Lorca--what was I thinking?  And Churchill, whom I despise but have to have handy, still looks after three decades like a chunk of blue brick.  My taxonomy is based on gravitational forces rather than subject matter: big books (usually) on the bottom so that my stacks tend to be perched on thousand-page biographies of politicians (Caro's Johnson holds up five, and quite steadily), then come many paperback novels and, as is only proper, above my window frames, the heliotropic poets of the contemporary era.  My best stack, unmoved for five years, stands proudly on Stephan J. Gould's unread (by me) The Structure of Evolutionary Thought--the redwood of my library.


Left alone to write: here, next to my foot, stuck together (I'm sorry to say) with years-

old spilled coffee, are E.M. Cioran's

On the Heights of Despair, Richard Yates's Liars in Love (a Delta paperback purchased at the Penn Book Center in 1982--so dried out, apart from the coffee, that it's now bound with an elastic band), and, the odd-ball of this melancholy trilogy, Clancy Martin's How to Sell, a cut-throat novel about (of all things) the Ft. Worth Diamond Exchange.  Three fine titles, now wiped clean, that trace the absurdity of human existence and/or of selling ostentatious jewelry to rich Texans.  Ciroan wins the sad sack contest hands down: sample Cioran chapters include, "The Return to Chaos," "The Blessings of Insomnia," and, my personal favorite, "Nothing is Important" as only a Romanian "philosopher of despair" could.  I bought this book in grad school, probably because Sartre and Camus seemed to me poseurs--what, after all, is French despair compared to Romanian?  Yates, of course, was the most under-appreciated chronicler of futility ever to write in English--"A Natural Girl," in Liars, is one of my favorite stories. I think I'll stay up tonight to reread it.

Actually, no I won't.  First I have to pick up this untidy pile of books and then, in honor of a another great writer, I'll read Alice Munro's story "The Eye," from her latest, and, I'm sorry to say, her final collection (like Philip Roth, Munro is retiring from writing, if she can) Dear Life. And tomorrow, or sometime, we'll get to those bookshelves. 

George Ovitt (10/10/13)

A Third Down, Two Thirds to Go

1Q84: A (Very Long) Novel by Haruki Murakami

Part I: 387 pages

Part II: 352 pages

Part III: 417 pages

I first purchased the 1100-page one-volume edition of Haruki Murakami's latest novel, but it was too cumbersome so I traded it in for the nifty three-volume set, paginated as indicated above--plump little paperback volumes that were not aggressively large.  They fit one's hand, have beautifully mystifying covers (twin moons and a woman's eye, both derived from the plot), and a clear slip case.  I suspect that Random House-Vintage was emulating the success of FSG's three-volume slip-cover edition of Bolano's 2666, but that was Bolano and the moment his masterpiece was published I bought the one-volume edition in hardcover, no questions asked.  Nobody makes a nicer book these days than Farrar, Straus, and Giroux--the binding on 2666 cracked after two readings, but the paper is slickly heavy and the cover art and book design are astonishing, and I once again wondered at the poverty of Kindle-reading, but didn't give it much thought in the same way I wonder why anyone would drink Budweiser instead of real beer but in the end don't really care about the answer. Anyway, Vintage went the distance for 1Q84--the endpapers are black and white sky scenes (clouds, moon) and the book's designers packed in as many adulatory blurbs as they could knowing that a thousand-plus page novel was going to be a hard sell, especially from a Japanese writer who is, let's face it, hardly a household name.  If Dan Brown were to write a thousand pages at least ten million people would eagerly plop down the now-standard $27.95 that a big commercial book costs; but $30 for Murakami requires the hard sell: "A grand, third-person, all encompassing novel..." (NYT).  An odd remark: what does "the third person" have to do with anything?  But the best comment, as one would expect, came from Charles Baxter, a writer who knows a thing or two about storytelling: "[1Q84] is generous in the way that Philip Roth is generous; you get the feeling that everything Murakami has thought, and felt, and experienced, is out there on the page.  Nothing gets held back, not even the ugliness--especially the ugliness..."  [my emphasis] I'm only one-third of the way through the book, and not sure I'll press on, but this observation seems exactly right--nothing is held back, and that can make a novel compelling (Proust!) but it can also turn a story into a slog (The Recognitions).  Which is 1Q84? Let's think about this for a minute.

If you've been to Tokyo you've seen a street like the one above--a narrow defile flanked by gaudy neon signs lettered in katakana, stylish young men and women, boisterous sounds of video arcades (I haven't been to Tokyo in a while and I suppose the arcades are gone), noodle shops, bars and sushi restaurants.  In other words, the sort of lively urban spaces that make Tokyo an exciting, if daunting place to visit.  I don't wish to be glib, or to diminish Murakami's extraordinary accomplishments--he is, I understand, on the short-list for this year's Nobel Prize--but he has always seemed to me to be the poet of this world--not at all a pop writer of erotica and drugginess like Ryu Murakami (Almost Transparent Blue) and not a novelist with the stature of Yasunari Kawabata or Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, but a hip, smart, inventive and perceptive chronicler of an odd-ball segment of Japanese urban life.  His novels are full of coincidences, off-beat characters, and situations that express the slippery unreality of everyday life.  I am especially fond of After Dark, Kafka on the Shore, and Norwegian Wood--the first of his books to make a splash in the West.  I am entranced by the unusual way in which, from nearly nothing, Murakami can cobble together a compelling story of outcasts in a world whose existence I can't even imagine.  Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I must admit, was my first failure with Murakami: I began the book with high hopes, wondering at the tightrope he was walking,  but was defeated as the story's cogency began to dissipate amidst dense paragraphs of what seemed to be irrelevant musing on tangential topics. WUBC provided a foretaste of my puzzlement with 1Q84 and, I now have come to feel, with Murakami's work in general.  I love big books, but I don't love self-indulgent books.  Or, I don't feel compelled to push through novels that seem more interested in the writer than in the reader. 

The third of 1Q84 that I have finished today has the following plot: a young Japanese woman named Aomame is an assassin who specializes in killing men who abuse women; she teaches martial arts; she lives alone but would very much like to find a man to fall in love with--meantime, she sleeps around.  Her story alternates with that of a young man named Tengo who would like to fall in love, who aspires to be a writer and who has been enlisted by an unscrupulous editor in a plot to win a major literary prize for an all-but-illiterate girl who, we are supposed to believe, is a preternaturally gifted storyteller.  That's about it except for one important point: both Tengo and Aomame (who will, I'm pretty sure, meet and fall in love in volume II) feel as if they have "slipped" into another temporal dimension.  It's hard to characterize this feeling that they have, though I understand it.  One does sometimes feel that one has fallen into a temporal black hole, or that there has been a slippage in one's life--things are not quite as they used to be and yet it is impossible to say exactly how they have changed.  In Murakami there's always this sense of unreality in the lives of his characters--salarymen or street folks, old people or young, everyone behaves as if the world were off-kilter, and this unsettling existential vertigo is both one of the great charms and deep frustrations of his books.

But what is more difficult for me is what Charles Baxter points to in his remarks on Murakami's writing--the lack of apparent discrimination between what is essential to the story, what is ancillary to the story, and what has nothing to do with anything (we learn, for example, exactly what everyone eats--I mean exactly).  Of course in a long book like 1Q84 we are being led down a rabbit-hole; many trivial events probably have a deeper resonance--the look in the eyes of a little girl on a train who reminds Tengo of something he can't recall, or the rather tedious details of the "Dowager's" life--all of this will probably mean something, but I know from Murakami's other books that this expectation might be disappointed; the piling on of details may lead to nothing at all and I will be left to wonder at the expenditure of time and energy that has gone into my reading of this (very long) novel.

And yet: there is something compelling in the thing.  First of all, the size of the book is irresistible: who wants to read novellas and short stories when the world is full of Infinite Jests? I thought about my Murakami problem quite a lot during the past week and spoke to my colleague Peter Nash about it.  Peter thinks there's a glitz and attraction in Murakami that entices us to give him the benefit of the doubt; the style is glib, easygoing and quite easy to fall in love with; but, in the end, (Peter and I both thought) there is a feeling that we've been enticed to pass a long night drinking and carousing, singing karaoke and knocking back shots of sake, but, when it ends, we're stuck on the same neon-lit street, a bit woozy but no wiser than when we began.

Dear Talented Readers, what do you think?  Should I go on or turn back?  The summit lies far in the distance, shrouded in moonlight and wispy clouds; love affairs, murders, and plagiarism stand between me and Mt. Murakami.  And, worst of all, there's a pile of books here on my desk that I am eager to take up--novels by Amouar Benmalek, Leon de Winter, and Cees Nooteboom impatiently tap their fingers on my computer wondering when in hell I'll finally renounce this oddball concoction of noir thriller and sci-fi mystery--a book written, as it were, by Doris Lessing and Stieg Larsson, right down to the martial arts heroine.  What to do?

Any advice would be welcome.






Published by Vintage in paperback (3 volume edition).
Chipp Kidd designed the book--its lovely.  Here is Mr. Kidd on the process--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUHck0FViac


George Ovitt (10/4/13)

The Crimes of Our Fathers: Germany—Algeria—France

The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal

Are we answerable for the crimes of our  fathers?  That is the question that haunts this bold and surprising novel by Algerian writer, Boualem Sansal, a story that moves back and forth through time and space, from present-day France to WWII Germany, from Paris to Frankfurt to the Algerian bled, to the desolate village of Aïn Deb, then back again to Paris, to an unnamed North African banlieue or suburb, one very much like Clichy-sous-Bois, made famous by the violent clashes between local youth and the French police in 2005 after two boys were accidentally electrocuted in an electrical substation while in hiding.

I first heard of Algeria when I was a child living with my family in the South of France. Charlie Joubert, the husband of my schoolteacher, the beautiful Lucienne, was from Algeria, a pied-noir or “black-foot,” as such Algerian-born Frenchmen were commonly if derisively known. Hounded out of Algeria following Independence, then treated as second-class citizens in France, the pieds-noirs have remained an embittered, doubly-alienated lot. In the little town of Dions where I lived in the early 1970’s, Monsieur Joubert was still viewed as an alien, an outsider, my schoolmates—no doubt voicing the prejudice of their parents—often muttering “kouskous” when they passed him in the street.

This story, however, is about a different sort of alienation, that of two Algerian boys born to a German father and a Berber mother. Opening with the suicide of one of the brothers, the eldest, a boy called Rachel (after Rahim), in the Paris suburb where he lived, the story follows the tortured emotional and psychological journey of his younger brother, Malrich (after Malek), as he struggles to come to terms not only with his seemingly successful brother’s suicide by gas and with the murder of his parents in Algeria by Islamic fundamentalists, but with his father’s secret Nazi past. 

Told as a journal within a journal, the novel explores, in fiction, in heretofore uncharted ways, the long and deadly embrace of Europe and North Africa. Widely praised as the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust, The German Mujahid is a brave and withering condemnation of European colonialism, German fascism, and Muslim anti-Semitism, as well as a bracing excoriation of the sort of radical Islam that remains the bane of North Africa and the Middle East today. Above all, it is a tale of self-discovery and the burden of justice, a story about that most essential human task: the charge—to each of us—to reckon with the past.

Boualem Sansal was born in 1949 in Algeria.  Since the publication of his novel Le serment des barbares, which was awarded the Best Frist Novel Prize in France in 1999, he has been widely considered one of his country’s most important contemporary authors.  He lives with his wife and tow daughters in Algiers.  The German Mujahid is published in English by Europa Editions.  Check out their list at http://www.europaeditions.com/ .

Peter Adam Nash

Jade Mirror

Women Poets of China, edited by Michael Farman

My love affair with (translated) Chinese poetry goes back many years, to my first encounter with Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, especially his renderings of the lyric poems of Tu Fu, still among the handful of poems I read regularly, in all seasons, simply as a way of reminding me of what it means to have a human sensibility.  I had looked at the world in the way one does--as a reflection of my ego--and never considered, as the Chinese poets are so fond of doing, that the world isn't a mirror of my being but that I am a mirror of it.

 "A Toast for Men Yun-Ch'ing"

Illimitable happiness,

But grief for our white heads.

We love the long watches of the night, the red candle.

It would be difficult to have too much of meeting,

Let us not be in hurry to talk of separation.

But because the Heaven River will sink,

We had better empty the wine-cups.

To-morrow, at bright dawn, the world’s business will entangle us.

We brush away our tears,

We go—East and West.

Tu Fu often writes, as here, of furtive meetings with friends, of drinking until dawn, of the fleeting nature of joy--the parts of life, in other words, that we want poetry to remind us of, for if poetry does nothing else, it must put us in mind of the ephemeral nature of the things we wish to believe are enduring--love and friendship and pleasure and life itself.  It was from the questionable translations of Rexroth and Pound (via Fenollosa) and Arthur Waley that I first understood, falsely I am sure, the meaning of 'conditioned arising' in Buddhism, the transitory and painfully beautiful nature of human experience as expressed in poetry. 

Garcia Lorca is the Western poet whose sensibility most reminds me of the Chinese poets I admire; the simplicity of his diction, the openness of form, the poetic voice that stands both within and outside of the core of the poem as in this simple verse from Primeras Canciones (1922):
 

"Half Moon"

The moon goes over the water.

How tranquil the sky is!

She goes scything slowly

the old shimmer from the river; 

meanwhile a young frog

takes her for a little mirror.

("Half Moon," trans. by W.S. Merwin)

My attachment to this form of poetic expression--direct, "unmediated" by conventions of prosody, honest to a fault--led me to the usual folly: I studied Chinese for a while, and when it was clear that I was too dense to memorize let alone reproduce a single character,  I set out to write my own Chinese poems without benefit of the language.  Does it appear an easy matter to write a poem like this one?

"Written in a Pavilion Lost in the Mists"

spring flowers, fall's

full moon:

               the stuff of poems.

cloudless sun. clear

nights. here: mountain

                    spirits, loosed.

no reason I raised

the pearl-sewn blinds.

                won't lower them.

my couch is moved for good now.

I'll turn toward these hills

                and sleep.

(Yu Xuanji trans. by Geoffrey Waters)

What I have noticed is that aspiring poets can reproduce the simple description in this form-- reminiscent of e.e. cummings--but when it comes to the real point of the poem, where the observing eye moves inward, when the poetic sensibility must construct meaning from the passive moment of watching flowers and moon and mountain--this is where the trouble begins.  Most pastiches of this sort of transparent poetry miss the point right at the line "I'll turn toward these hills/and sleep." What? Isn't the romantic (and it is the easiest thing in the world to think of Chinese and Japanese "nature" poets as "romantics"--maybe not as loquacious as Wordsworth, but with the identical set of feelings) supposed to regard the hills?  Isn't it rather anti-climactic to fall asleep?  And that's the way these deceptive poems often work: they take us to the edge of a simple truth and turn it against us--this is the art of disappointment, or of beauty as emptiness rather than fulfillment.

"Inspired by Scenery"

Half window, the entire setting sun
a curtain lifts in the breeze
Little, little pond, pavilion
a bamboo path
Maple leaves drunk red
in autumn color
Two or three rows of geese
centered against the evening sky.

(Zhu Shuzhen, trans. by Emily Goedde)

I have taken these last two examples from the lovely collection Jade Mirror: Women Poets of China, edited by Michael Farman.  Mr. Farman has wisely decided to include an even dozen poets in this collection so that each of the twelve women, whose lives stretch from the period of Book of Odes (600 B.C.E.) to World War II, can be represented by a judicious selection and we can therefore develop some sense of what each poet was attempting to achieve.  As Farman points out in his introduction, it was hardly an easy matter to be a woman and a poet through most of Chinese history.  Convention, gender roles, education, and isolation kept women marginalized from the highly political and deeply masculine world of poetry--the ability to compose verses (if not poems) was, after all, a prerequisite of advancement in Chinese society. We may therefore be especially joyful at the publication of this collection of rare and graceful poems.

Most of these poets were new to me; I especially loved reading Zhu Shuzhen and Xue Tao--wonderful poets whose precise, evocative diction suited their subjects perfectly.  Here is Xue Tao:

Head bent, I stood long
before a rambling rose,

lovely as fragrant basil:
its scent clung to my skirts.

Master Sun of Jadegreen Stream,
explain it all to me--

those shrikes
departing from the east,
those swallows, flying west.

(trans. Jeanne Larsen)

Is the poem lovely as fragrant basil, or the rose?  Why do the shrikes depart from the east?  Has she asked the question or merely anticipated doing so?  Yes, we have to fill in quite a lot, but isn't that the point?

Jade Mirror is published by White Pine Press.

http://www.whitepine.org/catalog.php

George Ovitt (10/1/13)

On Not Playing to Win

Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw by Thomas Glavinic

By one estimate there are 10 to the fortieth possible chess positions--maybe, but let's just say there's a lot of them.  I know, or I've heard, that there are 70,000 credible positions after the first seven moves of a game, a number that is somewhat easier to grasp.  Anyone who has played the game with any seriousness would agree that chess is "infinite," that is, the complexity of the thing is such that playing a great deal, as I once did, is likely to engage one's attention and excite one's passions as few other human endeavors are capable of doing. Once I was locked in a long game, going on three hours, in a tournament in New York City (full disclosure: I was then, and am now, a patzer), and had one of those moments that I so often have of "chess blindness"--not seeing a simple threat that lost the game.  As my opponent walked off to record his win, I sat transfixed, staring at the board, unable to believe that I had made such an elementary blunder.  I obsessed about that game for hours, played it over, cursed my stupidity, etc.  In other words, I was totally happy, completely engaged with the ideas behind the position, the what-ifs and all the simple moves I could have made to equalize or even win.  That's the way chess can be--mesmerizing, hypnotic, a form of thinking akin to doing mathematics or playing music at a high level of competence (I do neither).  "Chess is life" as the tee-shirt says. Not for me, not anymore, but for a brief time I could taste the obsession that drives so many to love the game more than anything--or to go mad with the endless complexity of it, or perhaps (I hate to say this), with its ultimate meaninglessness.

In 1923, Marcel Duchamp abandoned art for chess ("I am a victim of chess; it has all the beauty of art").  In fact, Duchamp co-authored a theoretical volume on what is called "the opposition" (in the endgame, the king's ability to defend the ring of squares that surround it) and "sister squares" that has some bearing on the book under review--which I'll get to before long--this is still the opening gambit.

Most people who read Nabokov don't read The Defense (or The Luzhin Defense), a book from his Russian period which is not only a fine novel but was made into the only decent chess film I have ever seen (starring John Turturro).  Nabokov composed endgame problems of great beauty and subtlety, with structures not unlike those of his fictions.  Here he is with Vera, his wife, also a fine player.

I have here on my shelves several novels about chess: there's Walter Tevis's wonderful story of a young woman chess prodigy called The Queen's Gambit which is smart about chess and human psychology (Tevis wrote The Hustler and was a passionate pool player but confessed to a greater passion for chess).   Among the finest novels ever written on the subject of chess is Stefan Zweig's The Royal Game, published in 1942 and reissued by New York Review Press not too long ago. In Zweig's novel chess saves a man's sanity instead of eroding it.  Thanks perhaps to the popular image of Bobby Fischer--a tragic figure who was one of the finest players of all time, a player to be ranked with Jose Raul Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Tal, and Garry Kasparov--Fischer, who lived only for chess and went mad as a result, has become a kind of anti-hero in chess fiction, a warning against the dangers of the game's allurements, or perhaps a warning against thinking too hard.  Other serious books featuring chess and chess players that I recommend are The Luneberg Variation by Paolo Maurensig (1993) and, among my perferred novels of any sort, Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla, about which I have been meaning to write for months. Here's Bobby at a tournament in Leipzig in the mid-1960's.

It was with considerable pleasure that I sat down this summer to read Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw by Thomas Glavinic, whose eerie and creepy Night Work I read a couple of years ago and found--how shall I put it? Indigestible.  But I knew I'd like CHLOTD since it was described as a fictionalized account of a real and quite well-known championship match between the Austrian grandmaster Karl Schlechter and the virtually unbeatable World Champion German grandmaster Emmanuel Lasker.  The fame, or notoriety, of this match--which took place in Vienna and Berlin in 1910--stems from the remarkable fact that Schlechter was one win, and perhaps one move, away from the championship when, in the tenth and final game he blundered in a winning position and ended up with a draw; as a result lost the match to Lasker (who retained his title due to the tie).  Schlechter's "love" of the draw is of course ironic, but in Glavinic's fictionalized account of the match and of Schlechter's psychological state, the fatal blunder takes on the character of a cosmic judgement against Haffner/Schlechter--always a conservative player, he takes a chance that is out of character and loses everything.

"The move [Haffner] had chosen was even stronger, viewed objectively, but it was an attacking move that precluded a draw [which was all Haffner needed to win the match]. There was no doubt about it, someone must have doctored his coffee. [Haffner] had lost his wits: he was playing to win."

Never before has Haffner risked anything--neither in chess nor in his life--and at the verge of a great triumph he becomes, for the first time, "obsessed with winning at all costs."   But it isn't ambition that costs Haffner the game but a simple blunder, a moment of chess blindness, a break in the absolute concentration that separates the great players from those who can yearn only for a draw.

Glavinic's is the best fictional account of a high-level chess match I have ever read.  The psychological tension and politics of chess are on display, as is the complex inner life of Haffner, a man who was at times obstuse in his private affairs, ambivilent in his relationships, dispassionate even in his great love for chess, and yet, at the moment when his life might have been redeemed, he (perhaps) threw away the prize deliberately by not, for the first time, "loving the draw."

How often I think that I have opted to merely "break even" in life--in a way this is the question Galvinic's novel explores--the cost of risks, the comfort of losing, the zugzwang that is the bane of our lives.

I believe that's Lasker seated on the right, Schlechter on the left.

Thomas Glavinic, born in 1972 in Graz, is a strong chess player and the author of four novels available in English--he is considered to be among the finest young Austrian writers.  Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw was his first book.

 

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1121156

This link will take you to the tenth game of Lasker-Schlechter, with annotations by Jose Raul Capablanca.  The blunder comes on the 64th move.

Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw is published by The Harvill Press of London.

George Ovitt (9/26/13)