A Game Born in Bloodshed
GOODMAN, WALTER
A Game Born in Bloodshed The Lüneburg Variation By Paolo Manrensig Farrar Straus Giroux. 140 pp. $19.00. Reviewed by Walter Goodman Only with the very last words of this taut novel is the...
...And decades after supposed peace, Tabori's carefully plotted mission of annihilation of his rival worked its way to its finale...
...It's a short book, so take your time...
...The players bear lifelong scars, neither body nor soul ever recovering fully...
...To strike home the point, he trains Hans on a sinister board that sends a shock through him when he makes a wrong move...
...Now Hans becomes the visible narrator of the plot against Frisch, beginning with the story of his own career in chess, guided by a genius named Tabori who had a "Levantine look...
...Be assured you will be hearing about that curiosity again...
...If you find yourself wondering where you are being led by such cruel chess lore, you may be reading too fast...
...Still in search of clues to where the match is heading...
...The relentless end game is described by Tabori himself (not his true name of course...
...More than that the reviewer must not give away...
...The ostensible subject is chess in its most obsessive form...
...Now the Frisch-Tabori match, which began as an adolescent feud, assumes an epic quality: "The game continued almost independent of my will...
...Maurensigtantalizes,tossingclues all over the place...
...Found on his desk was a strange board and set—buttons of various sizes and designs on patches of coarse cloth in a complicated mid-game position...
...The players' favored terms —attack, mastery, conquest, victory— were being applied to a far larger reality...
...The way Hans intrudes the memory of the brilliant and mysterious Tabori into Frisch's compartment leaves no doubt that the two clashed years before, not merely over the board but as players on a real killing field...
...Nothing binds two people like a serious challenge on a chessboard, making them counterposed poles of a jointly produced mental creation in which one is annihilated to the other's advantage...
...Here Maurensig seems to be copying from the accounts of many others...
...Well, note that Tabori also instructed Hans that chess requires stakes: "The greater the stakes, the sharper your attention...
...Enter young Hans Mayer, a strange sort of chess master who says he doesn't "have the heart to play against a fleshand-blood person.' In his pocket he squeezes a cloth packet...
...But that barely suggests the power of their encounter, and even after that terrible tournament the game is not yet over between them...
...Flashback follows flashback...
...But that only adds to the mystery, because we don't know who that "I" is or what game he is actually talking about...
...That, we are told, linked the narrator and the dead man "to an evil nightmare of the past...
...I am giving no secrets away...
...Guided by a cold logic of their own, the white pieces worked their way among the black, opposing forces balanced each other, and far in the distance, like a flashing light, loomed the outlines of the final solution...
...Before you know it, the invisible narrator is confessing to the killing, or rather to driving Frisch to suicide: "It was I who orchestrated the game...
...The coming of the Nazis meant the eradication of Jewish players and so the meaning of Tabori's existence: "Chess, too, donned the brown uniform...
...If that sounds like a description of the century's bloodletting, you are onto something...
...Remember that peculiar cloth chess board found on Frisch's desk...
...The reader doesn't have to be much of a sleuth to detect the villain fairly soon and even to foresee the shape of the final confrontation, if not its essence...
...Not that The Lüneburg Variation resembles a conventional thriller, except as it touches on abnormal psychology...
...Reviewed by Walter Goodman Only with the very last words of this taut novel is the game fully played out...
...There is no harsher or more implacable defeat...
...A battle like theirs, he says, "is in reality a struggle of exceptional violence, a form of bloodless homicide...
...We are informed early that chess was the man's passion and in time brought him down...
...From Tabori, Hans learned the knight's gambit that can throw a game into chaos...
...Taking over from Hans, he tells of his life, his chess rivalry with the man now known as Frisch, and his long and intractable search for him...
...he calls it "incoherent...
...It offends his notion of order...
...On the evening in question, Frisch unaccountably finds himself trying the Lüneburg variation, a move he has raged against repeatedly in his chess magazine...
...Right, it's the unorthodox "Lüneburg variation," which involves sacrificing a knight in a daring effort to queen a pawn...
...Narrated by a voice that is not identified until we approach the end game, the tale begins with news of the death under "mysterious circumstances" of Dieter Frisch, an "eminent personality...
...Hints along the way indicate he was also arrogant, smug, hypocritical, and otherwise obnoxious...
...But when the climactic Bergen-Belsen tournament is recounted and the nature of the stakes becomes clear, he is in control again as a storyteller, exploring the rules of desperately serious play in the most extreme circumstances...
...Although written by an Italian businessman, the book's flavor calls to mind estimable Middle European writers of the first half of this century like Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth...
...The psychologically knowing, intricately devised attack on Frisch is executed on the MunichVienna express, where his weekly opponent is his cautious, unimaginative colleague, Baum, a friend "since the bygone days of the War...
...Given its time and place, that is as it should be...
...When Tabori talks about chess he is also talking about the Holocaust...
...Tabori comes to see the game as "a perfect microcosm of a world that seemed positioned on the brink of great events," and a measure of the book's success is that you are not likely to dismiss that claim as mere chess-aslife glibness...
...This means, of course, that the story is about genius and madness and especially the violence of an encounter that aims to do nothing less than annihilate the enemy...
...The final pages are grim and gripping...
...No investigator, for example, spots the decisive clue right there on the strange chess board, a mid-game defense that Frisch was unavailingly trying to demolish...
...Such is the novel's opening, seemingly lucid yet far from clear...
...Keep in mind the novel's first line as you embark on its relentless course: "They say that chess was born in bloodshed...
...The flashbacks to the persecution of the Tabori family in Germany and Austria are the book's least original...
...Consider those photographs in Tabori's home, described by Hans as a "miniature graveyard of memory...
...the book jacket announces that Tabori the Jew and Frisch the Nazi last met in a death camp...
...And if the word "existential" were still popular in literary conversation, it would surely find its way into the reviews...
...Does he really mean it is too human for him to handle...
...Tabori told him, "What you're looking at is an altar to absence, to the death of the spirit...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
