Chess books and film (and other culture)

[Francis Fields]

The Louvre in Paris has a portrait Of Labourdonnais painted by his friend Lequesne. As there is the Lequesne manoeuvre in endgame theory I have considered whether it was the same person.

[Jon Mahony]

The best chess fiction I've come across has been Anthony Glyn's The Dragon Variation. I stumbled across it serendipitously forty years back and have yet to see a more realistic depiction of the world of chess. Tevis and Nabokov can't hold a candle to Glyn.

Just ordered a copy from Amazon - Sadly it seems to be as rare as rocking horse *ahem* over here, so I've had to order it from an American seller, so that'll be 2 months coming I'll have chance to read at least 2 more books in the wait. Sounds like its worth it though.

[Jon Mahony]

I’ve now read The Dragon Variation, it was good, but I have to say I prefer the more fast-paced and interesting Tevis novel. This contains spoilers if anyone is worried:

I enjoyed the character of Paul, the pretentious Chess journalist who despite his jet setting reputation is obviously living life on a financial razors edge - he had likable and unlikable traits and by the end of the novel it was still hard for me to decide how I felt about him (probably what Glyn intended). Paul however is the central character that links all the others, from very different backgrounds, together.

Robin and George Wheaton were also very intriguing characters. Wheaton is a very interesting, if somewhat minor character, but I love his chapter set at the Blackpool congress. Wheaton is basically the ageing ‘expert’ who had minor success 40 years ago in a time when England had no Grandmasters, but who is now struggling to recapture his glory years against tough international competition.

The chapter is one of my favourites in the book and it captures the feel of the Blackoool congress perfectly (despite been written 40+ plus years ago - there are less picture post card vendors and more crack heads on the streets now!) Wheaton’s back story is page turning stuff, and you do feel for him when he recants a time many years ago at the Bognor Congress, where his wife had suggested he should think about taking a job and play chess as an amateur, after a string of bad results.

There is one of several strange and unexplained moments of the book in this chapter - Wheaton after reviling his is a practitioner of Yoga, gives himself a home-made enema in the bathroom of his Blackpool B&B - its hard to be sure if he is doing this for spiritual reasons, to prepare himself for the game the following day, or if there is a hint of doing it for sexual thrills? - to my mind, Glyn leaves this question unanswered, but Hey-ho!

We leave Wheaton’s character sat catatonic at the Chess board, after allowing himself to be back ranked, when he had a crushing advantage against the world champion.

Robin is a young up and comer who first comes to Pauls attention when he beats the former world champion at the same Blackpool congress. Robin is studying to get into university but allows his education to slip when the chess bug bites him. I love the chapter where Robin hides away in his room and sits up all night studying his postal Chess moves, when he should be doing his college course work.

It eventually emerges that while Robin is a talented amateur, who had initial success, long term he doesn’t have what it takes it make it on the international circuit and by this point he has also failed his A-Levels - however I found his suicide attempt somewhat pathetic and it didn’t seem to tie in with the story at all. The book by this point becomes a bit of a muddle. But the English characters really do give a realistic feeling to Chess in England and particularly in the North of England.

I however found the American characters a lot less intriguing - to sum this up in a few lines, a former minor American female player, currently going through a divorce, discovers a young Muslim boy who is a natural at chess, while holidaying with her rather drippy daughter, in his country. She rather unrealistically gets him right back to the US of A and he wins a few tournaments, before running away with her daughter in the middle of a match with her boyfriend and Bobby Fischer clone, Carl. Whatever… this half of the book was hard to care about, though I did read it all pretty fast so I must have been interested enough.

All-in-All the Chess aspects of the book are more realistic, but I prefer The Queen’s Gambit

[Stewart Reuben]

My enjoyment of Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis was spoilt, if I remember correctly, that one game commenced 1 e4 c6 2 d4 d5 3 Nc3 exd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nf3. The chief protagonist, Beth, was white. The moves were talk-through explained, not shown in notation. But my memory isn't that reliable!

Do read 'The Royal Game' by Stefan Zweig. Also 'The Defense' by Vladimir Nabokov. I reached only page 50 of 'Auto da Fe' by Elias Canetti. Of course that won the Nobel Prize for literature. I had forgotten that I have a copy of 'Pawn to Infinity' an anthology of science fiction short stories all of which feature chess.

You may find 'Trotter's Bottom' by Tanya Jones, which features a Russian grandmaster, intriguing. The author is the mother of Gawain Jones.

There are many other works which feature chess to one extent or another.

[Kevin Thurlow]

Not sure if this counts...

http://www.aol.co.uk/video/cat-pretends ... d%3D340403

[Jonathan Bryant]

My enjoyment of Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis was spoilt, if I remember correctly, that one game commenced....

My enjoyment of Queen’s Gambit was spoilt, if I remember correctly, by the fact that it’s not a very good book. I agree that Zweig’s and Nabokov’s are much better.

[Clive Blackburn]

Not sure if this counts...

http://www.aol.co.uk/video/cat-pretends ... d%3D340403

That would work better with furry mittens, the human hands are distracting

[Jon Mahony]

My enjoyment of Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis was spoilt, if I remember correctly, that one game commenced....

My enjoyment of Queen’s Gambit was spoilt, if I remember correctly, by the fact that it’s not a very good book. I agree that Zweig’s and Nabokov’s are much better.

Matter of opinion that as I loved it Though I agree it has its flaws, the part where Beth (who is supposed to be a super GM) tells the reader she purposely avoids the endgame as she doesn’t like it, is an “ugg really?!” moment, this is obviously the voice of the Class C Tevis.

a lot of people don’t know that the Tevis also wrote the Hustler which was made into a famous film. I actually much prefer the novel of the Hustler - the film changes the story in order to keep the leading lady in longer, and comes across as a little tedious towards the end, for doing so.

I enjoyed The Defence the novel is far superior to the film, where Lushin comes across as rather pathetic, there are quite a few cringe worthy, fast-forward the DVD, moments.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Resurrecting this thread (last posted to nearly nine years ago) to add in a couple of literary examples of chess that I metioned in a different thread, but which really belong here:

I cannot remember if we have a thread for literary allusions to chess, but in case it is of interest, I happened to be looking through Volume 2 of the 1817 satirical work 'Melincourt' by Thomas Peacock (as you do), and I noticed Chapter XXVII "The Chess Dance" (from page 200 onwards):

https://archive.org/details/melincourt0 ... 0/mode/2up

I will leave it to the literati to see how much chess content there actually is...

I have now actually read through the Peacock chapter, and it is an interesting example of 'live' chess, which makes me wonder if the year (1817) was actually early enough to make this one of the earliest examples of this sort of thing? There are even the first few moves of a game (but no more than that). It is difficult to know quite what to make of it.

While trying to see if anyone else had noticed and commented on this before, I came across something else completely different, a poem by the US poet Jean Garrigue (1912-1972):

The Chess Dance

That edition/version was published in September 1957, and includes of a number of rather abstract (but almost recognisable) chess references, mainly it seems to me, the angst of playing chess. Makes me wonder if she played chess or was just observing its effect in others.

14 stanzas (roughly, depending on the page breaks) across 4 pages (pp.337-340 of Volume 90, Number 6, September 1957, of the monthly publication 'Poetry').

Would genuinely be interested in what people think of it (she is described by some as a 'difficult' poet to read). I suspect (though have not looked for any reviews or analysis of the poem) that she is actually describing something else, and using the rather thin veneer of pseudo-chess elements as some sort of metaphor or other poetic allusion, though it is beyond me to quite work out exactly what she is trying to say.

The stanza that seems most apt is this one (though it is not easy reading):

Lured by the look of the game each gives
Till heart in mouth, it seems one comes
In the time of the nightingales
With expressly the one step it was known
Would come from the Golden Isles
For which what wouldn't be done to leap
Out of the skin to leap out of the dance
Past the cruel master of chance.

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