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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
THE CLASSIC INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A new edition of this classic Zweig story - an epic chess match on a translatlantic liner during WW2 unearths a story of persecution and obsession On the deck of a transatlantic ocean liner, a crowd of passengers gathers to watch reigning chess world champion Mirko Czentovic take on a series of amateur challengers. The haughty grandmaster dispatches all of his opponents with ease, until one Dr B steps forward from the crowd - a passionate lover of the royal game who still bears the mental scars of imprisonment by the Nazis in his native Austria. The enigmatic genius reluctantly agrees to challenge Czentovic, but at what cost to his sanity? Written during the Second World War, The Royal Game was the great Stefan Zweig's final work - a searing, suspenseful tale of psychological torment and the price of obsession.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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‘Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella—Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov’
Paul Bailey
‘An unjustly neglected literary master’
The Times
‘The Updike of his time’
New York Observer
‘He was capable of making the reader live other people’s deepest experience—which is a moral education in itself. My advice is that you should go out at once and buy his books’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Zweig is the most adult of writers; civilised, urbane, but never jaded or cynical; a realist who nonetheless believed in the possibility—the necessity—of empathy’
Independent
‘For far too long, our links with Zweig… have been broken… it’s time to forge them again’
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‘Stefan Zweig’s time of oblivion is over for good… it’s good to have him back’
Salman Rushdie, The New York Times
‘Zweig is at once the literary heir of Chekhov, Conrad, and Maupassant, with something of Schopenhauer’s observational meditations on psychology thrown in’
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Contents
The Royal Game
The large steamship leaving New York for Buenos Aires at midnight was caught up in the usual bustle and commotion of the hour before sailing. Visitors from shore pressed past one another to take leave of their friends, telegraph boys in skew-whiff caps shot names through the lounges, cases and flowers were brought and inquisitive children ran up and down flights of stairs while the orchestra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flashbulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us—it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure. My friend looked across and smiled. “You have an odd fish on board with 8you there, that’s Czentovic.” And since I must have looked fairly baffled in response to this news, he explained by adding, “Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s worked over the whole USA with his tournaments and now he’s off to conquests new in Argentina.”
As a matter of fact I did now remember this young world champion and even some details of his meteoric career; my friend, a more attentive reader of the newspapers than I am, was able to expand on them with a whole series of anecdotes. Around a year previously, Czentovic had put himself on a level with the most established old masters of the art of chess—Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker, Bogolyubov—at a single stroke; not since the appearance of the seven-year-old wunderkind Reshevsky at the 1922 New York Masters had the irruption of an unknown into the hallowed guild aroused such a general furore. For in no way was such dazzling success indicated by Czentovic’s intellectual capabilities. It soon trickled out that in his private life this chess champion was incapable of writing so much as one sentence correctly in any 9language and, in the angry taunt of one of his disgruntled colleagues, “his education in every field was uniformly nil.” The son of a dirt-poor boatman on the middle Danube whose tiny coracle was run over one night by a grain freighter, the then twelve-year-old was taken in out of pity after the death of his father by the priest of their remote hamlet, and the good pastor did his best to make up with extra help at home all that the dull, uncommunicative, thick-skulled child was unable to learn in the village school.
