Chessville Reviews - The Chess Set in the Mirror - Written by Massimo Bontempelli, Translated by Estelle Gilson, Illustrated by Sergio Tofano - Reviewed by Rick Kennedy

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The Chess Set in the Mirror
Written by Massimo Bontempelli
Translated by Estelle Gilson
Illustrated by Sergio Tofano

Reviewed by Rick Kennedy

Paul Dry Books, Inc., 2007

ISBN: 9781589880313

softcover, 114 pages

Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960) was a prolific Italian critic, novelist, playwright and poet, and an early practitioner of the literary style of magic realism. As the Oxford Companion to English Literature explains:

Magic realist novels and stories have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic merges with the unexpected and the inexplicable and in which elements of dreams, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday...

In The Chess Set in the Mirror (written in 1922) we meet a nameless 10-year old who, for reasons unexplained, finds himself placed in a largely empty, locked room. On the fireplace mantle is a mirror – and a chess set. The room itself is boring, and the view out of the window is no more entertaining. It is only a matter of time, as with Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1897), that the narrator finds himself (at the White King’s invitation) on the other side, in the mirror.

On an infinite plane, the chess pieces are all there, along with a host of others, all who had, at one time or another, seen themselves in the mirror. A burglar, for example, a chambermaid, and the boy’s grandmother – when she was young.

In a playfully wise voice reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince (1943), the author/narrator explores this puzzling mirror-world. If he is here in the mirror, for example, is he also back there in the room? What happens if all of the observers look away? And what of the contention of the King that his world embodies reality, that:

Everything that occurs among human beings, especially the most important things, which one studies in history, are nothing more than confused imitations and a hodgepodge of variants of the great games of chess we have played.

Estelle Gilson, who has translated Bontempelli’s Separations: Two Novels of Mothers and Children and The Faithful Lover, presents the author’s words in The Chess Set in the Mirror with just the right tone, delivering an engaging child’s tale that will capture its share of adults as well. Sergio Tofano’s line drawings add to the whimsy.

“I never could learn to play chess” the young boy begins his tale. “Chess lovers say that this is a serious defect.” That The Chess Set in the Mirror is not specifically a chess book – that it contains none of Clyde Nakamura’s “dragons and other mythical openings” for example, nor the instruction of Duane Porter’s Charlie and the Chess Set – is not a serious defect. The Chess Set in the Mirror is an entertaining tale with enough thought-starters to keep the reader smiling and thinking afterwards.