marc129 's review for:

Schachnovelle by Stefan Zweig

3.0

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A clever novella without a powerful plot or intrigue, but that offers a penetrating evocation of the psychological horror of the Nazi-persecution. The book was published after the author's suicide in 1942, when he had already been in exile for the Nazis for some time. Zweig describes a remarkable game of chess aboard a steamer from New York to Buenos Aires. It is not until well into the story that the main character appears, an Austrian who was detained by the Gestapo for a long time after the Anschluss of 1938, in a hotel in Vienna that they used as their headquarters. The man’s description of the psychic terror he went through is the core of this novella. Zweig delivers it in a captivating way, perhaps illustrating his own trepidated state of mind, on the run for the Nazis, desperate about the gloomy state of the world. The denouement of the story - as with other novellas by this author - is somewhat disappointing. But by then Zweig had clearly had made his point.