Chess Story - Under the Microscope

Chess Story

Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig, is an odd little book. It's a book about chess, but as much as it's about chess it's also about obsession, and about how the obsessions that save us can also be the obsessions that destroy us.

This is a classic narrator as witness story, where the narrator is a character in the story, but not central to it: he is there to tell the events of others. In this case, it's an ocean trip on a liner, in which the narrator finds out that he's traveling with the chess world champion. One of the other passengers decides to challenge the champion and predictably loses. Unalbe to accept this, however, the passenger challenges the champion again, and soon (again) finds himself in a poor position. This time, however, another passenger intervenes and offers advice. His advice is so good that the others force him to take over the game -- a game he wins.

Who is the stranger? How is it that he can beat the world champion? And can he do it again?

The writing here is strong, both lucid and precise, and yet around the edges of this clarity lie madness, lie the telling details of obsession, and what obsession can mean in the lives and minds of individuals.

This book seemed particularly interesting to me right now because my five-year-old is currently obsessed with chess (and, um, can probably beat me. Which is likely a sign of both his talent and my un-talent). Hopefully his ending is a little happier...

Beginning a New Novel: Writer's Limbo

There's something exciting and fearful about the blank page: it is both open and closed. Open to possibility, open to the moment of discovery, open to the potential of a new creation, but closed, yet, to words, and somehow impenetrable. The blank page is opaque, and yet there is an eternal hint of translucency. There's a hint of something beyond, of images and movements, of stolen moments from strange lives. Yet never clear. It's like words heard from a distance, so faint that you are not entirely sure whether they are sounds or imaginings. And yet the wall of the white page ascends before you. Is there a door? If there is, you need a key.

I always find this moment strange, the moment when I'm between one thing and another. Standing on a precipice, deciding whether to jump. For the last few years I've been revising. I've been writing, too: blogs, short stories, new scenes in old novels -- even entirely new storylines woven through these old stories. But never a new novel. And there's something about that, above all other things, that engages me: writing the first draft of a new novel.

It is both exciting and fearful. Perhaps this is always the case with the unknown, the inherent potential for both bliss and catastrophe, whether fictive or real. I've recently finished some drafts of old novels, and now I have this wide white space before me. Calling. Voices are whispering beyond the white page, the white wall. And yet each day the page seems a little more translucent and I see a little more of the world beyond. Faces, mere shadowed silhouettes, press close to the page from the far side, as if they, too, are listening for me; waiting for what? Instructions? Demands? Supplications? Prayers? The animating touch of fingers upon keys?

I know it is a matter of momentum, a matter of imaginative force. I hesitate, always, at the beginning. Beginnings are always the hardest for me, both in a technical sense and in the sense of my own impetus. But there is rich soil on the other side of that white wall, and the ideas are cimbing out of the ground. Whispering. Calling. Wondering. I know, soon, soon, soon, they will get stronger. The din of the voices will grow loud. Fingers will scratch the back of the white page. Tentative at first, but then stronger and stronger. A rip will appear, and then a tear, and then a face will press through, a question on its lips. Now?

Yes, yes: now.

The Climber - The World in Miniature

by Meredith Towbin
meredithtowbin.com


THE CLIMBER
At twenty, Jack bought a beat-up Ford and told his mother he wanted to climb big rocks. He pushed the backseat down at night and slept with his head in the trunk and his feet by the gearshift. Five miles outside Devil’s Tower, a hitchhiker stabbed him in the gut with a jackknife. While he bled in the road he wondered why anyone would steal a beat-up Ford with an industrial-sized bag of Lucky Charms in the trunk.

Four Short Walls #39 - The Jimmy Wars

Four Short Walls #38 - Payday

Something new, growing up through my books

Finishing a Manuscript Draft