Chess Story by Stefan Zweig - Book Review

It seems that every time a literary or cinematic work tries to depict a chess game, it always creates this fierce game where victory, loss, and aptness are outlined, but what makes Chess Story different is the new perspective Zweig uses to look at chess.

It isn’t about big confrontations between good and evil or life or death. In chess story, the characters don’t play for their lives—the way Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr do in X-men— but they contest because that is all they ever knew and ever will know.

Chess Story offers three perspectives to the royal game: the champion, the amateur, and the outsider. Mirko Czentovic is the expert who knows nothing but to manipulate the chessboard to his favors. He has been doing this ever since he was a child. On the other hand, there is the enigmatic Dr. B, who has astonishing skills in playing chess.

Yet, he is not as renowned as his peer Czentovic. Lastly, there is the narrator, who offers us his angle of the story and knows how to play chess, but he only plays the game for fun, unlike the other two men.