Reading J.C. Hallman’s non-fiction THE CHESS ARTIST: GENIUS, OBSESSION, AND THE WORLD’S OLDEST GAME, I was continually reminded of Stefan Fatsis’ WORD FREAK. That book was an outsider’s infiltration into the strange world of Scrabble, littered with a host of bizarre social misfits who treat the game as a way of life.
And the same goes for Hallman, who (like me) is fascinated by the game of chess even though he’s not a player. He befriends a fellow casino worker – a lonely man named Glenn who aspires to be the world’s first black grandmaster – and together they take a trip to an obscure province of Russia, where the loony president has constructed a Chess City, forcing the game on its downtrodden residents. Suspicion surrounds them their entire stay, and they rightfully fear for their lives.
Back home, they travel to open tournaments, play hardened criminals in prison matches and crash a Princeton University chess party, where the schizophrenic A BEAUTIFUL MIND subject John Nash makes a cameo. Woven through the narrative is Hallman’s selective trip of the mind through chess history, which he uses to craft theories on why a game that he deems “useless” has for some become a religion.
Largely, THE CHESS ARTIST is a travelogue. But it’s also a history lesson, a murder mystery, a spy novel and – at its core – a moving story of an unusual friendship. And amazingly, it’s not one big mess. Hallman deftly maneuvers his many threads as the prodigies he writes about do with their plastic pieces. Like WORD FREAK, it has a lot of humor and a lot of heart. Also like that book, I got completely lost in it and was genuinely sorry to see it come to an end. –Rod Lott
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Dear Sir,
Please send me a reviewer’s copy for the Dutch Chess Collector’s magazine?
Sj. C. van Ketel, Lange Mare 88, 2312 GT Leiden, The Netherlands.