|
|||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
|
The goal of all life is death. – Freud
St. Petersburg, 1914. It has its unseemly underside as well, one increasingly more difficult to keep hidden, inconveniently breaking forth in acts of senseless violence. As the days unfold in Bennett’s novel, and various passions erupt, it appears that Freud had it backwards: where ego was, there shall id be…
Men are more moral than they think Dr. Otto Spethmann, psychoanalyst, has a small practice in St. Petersburg. On behalf of his patients, he searches for reason amongst their unreason. Mourning his late wife, Elena, indulging his daughter Catherine, and chiding his talented, rascally friend Kopelzon, Spethmann would seem to have enough work as it is, without getting caught up in the dogged Inspector Lychev’s investigation of two murders, avoiding the ever-present eyes and ears that report to the secret police’s Colonel Gan, and invoking the machinations of the rich and powerful man known as “The Mountain.” For love the good doctor will cross personal and professional boundaries and find himself in the arms of his intriguing, and married, patient, Anna Ziatdinov.
Love and work... As if the great city knew that it needed to import some rationality, eleven chess masters, including World Champion Lasker and the dashing Capablanca, have been invited to play in a grand tournament. All eyes, however, are on the brilliant, but deeply troubled, Avrom Rozental, who “for the last two or three years has been unbeatable.” Spethmann is charged with helping Rozental recover his health and play – not an easy task by any means. Ronan Bennett, whose novels include The Second Prison (1991), The Catastrophist (1998) and Havoc, in its Third Year (2004), develops his characters and writes engagingly about them in Zugzwang. Quite simply, it is a good read. The story moves along steadily, despite its complexity, no doubt in part due to the fact that the book was serialized weekly in Britain’s The Observer. Ironies crisscross the novel like rebar. Zugzwang presents not a black-and-white world like the chessboard, but one that is populated more with “bad good guys” and “good bad guys.” Spethmann grapples with an ongoing game of chess against Kopelzon, even as he tries to make sense of his own (and others’) actions; yet the winning move appears on his chess board, unseen, during a break-in by thugs. Psychoanalysis, the latest treatment method, matches up against Rozental’s paranoid delusions like an Old Time patzer facing up to grandmaster Akiba Rubinstein – upon whom Rozental is based. And when Spethmann explains that “With my patients I am the good father: attentive, kind, calm, fair, strict, un-reproachful and present” one can readily ascertain where that dynamic is going… The ego is not master in its own house. – Freud
Bennett seems familiar with Freud’s lament that “we are never so defenseless
against suffering as when we love.” Yet we continue to seek love.
While the front cover of Zugzwang describes the contents as “a
riveting story of treachery, murder, intrigue and passion,” it leaves me,
oddly, to muse on the question of optimism vs pessimism in
chess. Clearly the optimist sides with E. J. Diemer, whose motto,
“from the first move, towards mate!” brooks no discussion. The
pessimist may well ponder zugzwang, however, which the author
defines: a position in which a player is reduced to as state of utter
helplessness. He is obliged to move, but every move only makes his
position even worse.
|
The
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
