A Yugoslavian orphan, he was still, at fourteen, counting on his fingers, reading with difficulty. “He’s crisscrossed America from coast to coast playing tournaments and is now off to Argentina for fresh triumphs.”Įven for a chess champion, Czentovic is bizarre. It’s about - or seems at first to be about - the world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic, traveling by boat from America to Argentina. The best showroom for this architectural trick is Chess Story, a novella published after Zweig’s death in 1942. A seemingly insignificant character begins to tell what you expect will be a story of at most a paragraph or two thirty pages later you find yourself immersed in a different book altogether. You tool along in his books, admiring the lively prose, enjoying the tinge of melodrama - and then you come upon a hidden door. Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer from the period just before the second World War, is the master of this dream’s literary equivalent.
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