Mixed Bag Again

Chess Story – 5/5 Stars

Still one of the most brilliant short stories I’ve ever read. This story begins slowly with a ship crossing the sea. Over the course of days on the ship a small chess contingent forms and plays in the common area. Ostensibly the goal is to pass the time and even play for small amounts of money. The amateurs are made aware that the chess world champion is on board, and we are treated to several characters theories about the game, and the young chess champion’s history. He is a savant player, one who cannot truly visual the board without the physical apparatus, and who wins brilliantly, but without the sense of history and prestige the game has traditionally held. If this feels like the evocation of them, well, you’re not wrong, but it’s yours to figure out. A loud Scotsman decides to try to get the champion to play the group of men in a game with multiple boards. The champions avers but does say he’ll play the group of men together, using their collective brain power against his own (and he’s happy to make the $250 the Scotsman is fronting). The game begins and the men soon find themselves in a curious position. The champion seems to barely paying attention, excusing himself to go read magazines while the men confer, but they are on the edge of queening a pawn. Feeling certain it’s a trap, but not knowing how, they are about to move their piece when they are abruptly stopped by an unknown man. He carefully tells them the right move, how to avoid the trap, what the trap is, and gives them a long-term strategy. With their new man, they successfully move the match to a draw, shocking the champion, who is supremely curious about the new, strange man. The rest of the story goes into who he is and where he comes from.

It’s a gorgeously maniacal throughout, and captures the deep sadness and loss that Zweig found himself in as Nazis destroyed his world.

Dream Story – 4/5 Stars

In high school, I just turned 17 when Eyes Wide Shut came out, which is any film nerd boy’s dream, right? Speaking of dreams, that movie is based pretty heavily (though changed in various ways, and updated) on this Austrian story from the 1920s by Arthur Schnitzler. What would surprise you about this story is how pretty close, not just in plot, but in detail the film version ended up being.

The story involves a youngish (but not too young) married couple, a doctor and his wife. They are social, they go out, but there’s obviously something waning in their marriage. Both have confessed to adulterous feelings and close calls on affairs, but nothing ruinous ultimately. Our doctor friend is made aware of a secret, well, sex club basically where masked rich people get together and THINGS happen. He steals the pass code and enters the event, is found out, and expelled (there’s a scene in which a woman he is convinced he’s in love with “sacrifices” herself for him), and he spends the rest of the story searching for her, searching for the club and clues, and ultimately trying to figure out how to live with himself.

Sun and Steel – 3/5 Stars

There was a dumb reddit or Twitter post a few months back that went viral. In it, some boy (always a boy) starts spouting off about the waster hours people spend at the gym, unreading poems, unwriting songs, and the like. People were dunking on him left and right of course, and I kept thinking about how much I listen to audiobooks while I do chores or go for runs. You can do both buddy.

What you can also do is dedicate your life to the complete and total control of turning your muscles into steel, you body into a machine, and your brain into a steel trap through which to face the alienation of the world and the fallen patriarchal empire you’ve carved your identity out of you. You COULD do that, and plenty of people do versions of this, but it’s as likely to help you as it did Yukio Mishima, which who knows.