Successful Writer Blog

It is Passover time in Israel, the great chess game between God and Pharaoh, and I was so busy in the preparations that I didn’t have time to finish what I wanted to write about Zweig’s The Game of Kings. I believe that every fine story is about two forces that collide and here, aboard one ship two geniuses meet for a duel of chess. They are both self-taught masters but for one chess is the only way of being honored and for the other it is a mental illness. I don’t know if Zweig read Nabokov’s classic Defense but his story is simpler and its agenda is not so much about chess, rather about social classes and psychology and the need to rebuild a crumbling world. Unlike Nabokov’s book, Zweig’s hero can stop his madness by simply ceasing to play. What I take from this novella is that if you want to show that a character is inhuman you must not let them speak or bear a monologue because this may lead to the reader empathizing with them too much. If you want a character to be hated it is better to only view them from the outside. Another point of interest is the way Zweig can brilliantly describe the indescribable. This is one of the first cases in literature where the behavior of the Nazis is described and so is the chess madness which is for me a very refined psychology.
This week we shall deal with what ships, sailing and sailors in general mean in Eastern and Western literature, not just as a transportation vessel but as a symbolic meaning too.
Yours,
Yoav

Chess is like wine or cigarettes; it has enormous cultural weight and history.
The ‘Game of Kings’ appears in many stories, maybe because like in a film it can be used as a metaphor. Chess is a dual, a shift in the balance of power between two people and perhaps is a good way to describe what was once called ‘idiot savant’ i.e. that they are failures in every field but chess.
Some of the most original and surreal uses can be found in Lewis Carroll’s books, when the chess pawns become characters. The real question is what we can learn from these games, which are a story within a story especially in the adult world, for instance, today the games we play are so complex that they leave very little room for imagination.
What interests me in the books that we are going to read this week is the fact that our writers and their characters are in going through a transition. Could chess be a key to connect the old world and the new and not just a battle of wits? I believe that the books we’ll read will show that this talent is not merely about wits – but a ‘psychological’ understanding, (no matter how obscene this word may sound).