The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game [Hardcover]

J. C. Hallman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2003

In the tiny Russian province of Kalmykia, obsession with chess has reached new heights. Its leader, a charismatic and eccentric millionaire/ex--car salesman named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is a former chess prodigy and the most recent president of FIDE, the world's controlling chess body. Despite credible allegations of his involvement in drug running, embezzlement, and murder, the impoverished Kalmykian people have rallied around their leader's obsession---chess is played on Kalmykian prime-time television and is compulsory in Kalmykian schools. In addition, Kalmyk women have been known to alter their traditional costumes of pillbox hats and satin gowns to include chessboard-patterned sashes.

The Chess Artist is both an intellectual journey and first-rate travel writing dedicated to the love of chess and all of its related oddities, writer and chess enthusiast J. C. Hallman explores the obsessive hold chess exerts on its followers by examining the history and evolution of the game and the people who dedicate their lives to it. Together with his friend Glenn Umstead, an African-American chessmaster who is arguably as chess obsessed as Ilyumzhinov, Hallman tours New York City's legendary chess district, crashes a Princeton Math Department game party, challenges a convicted murderer to a chess match in prison, and travels to Kalmykia, where they are confronted with members of the Russian intelligence service, beautiful translators who may be spies, seven-year-old chess prodigies, and the sad blight of a land struggling toward capitalism.

In the tradition of The Professor and the Madman, Longitude, and The Orchid Thief, Hallman transforms an obsessive quest for obscure things into a compulsively readable and entertaining weaving of travelogue, journalism, and chess history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

During a postcollege stint as a blackjack dealer in Atlantic City, freelance writer Hallman discovered the chess community that thrives in dealer lounges. There he met 39-year-old chess master Glenn Umstead, who performed exhibitions while blindfolded and had "hoped to become the world's first black grandmaster." The two became friends and embarked on an exploration of the chess subculture, a grand tour that took them from Princeton to prisons, from windowless rooms to the "giant electronic chess room" of the Internet Chess Club (ICC). At his first tournament, in Philadelphia, Hallman found "watered-down machismo and bent personalities." He visits the chess-obsessed characters of Manhattan's Washington Square Park: "In winter chess players could be found in the park dressed in huge down jackets, the only problem presented by the cold being the difficulty of moving pieces while so encumbered." He interviews Claude Bloodgood, a high-ranking chess player serving a life sentence for murdering his mother who once reputedly tried to use chess to escape from prison (he denies it). Much of the book is devoted to a fascinating visit to Kalmykia, an impoverished Russian province, whose president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is "a not entirely unsympathetic supervillain with a kooky plan to dominate the chess world," evident in his 1998 construction of Chess City with its centerpiece, the Chess Palace, a five- story glass pavilion. Interweaving art and literary references along with the game's 1,200-year history, Hallman summarizes the many meanings and metaphors of chess in the final chapter: "Chess had come to represent intimacy, economics, politics, theories bleeding from rhetoric to outrageous science." Chess enthusiasts will enjoy this delightful tour.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This is a book that chess players should not be without. Not only is it a voyage through the subculture of chess; not only is it a portrait of two men, an American chess master and a Russian dictator, obsessed with the game; not only is it a history of the game whose origins stretch back nearly a millennium and a half; not only is it all that, it's also an exploration of the complex psychology and philosophy of chess. Traveling with his friend, a rather eccentric chess master (eccentricity and a unique kind of intelligence seem to be vital components of the successful chess player's mind), the author samples many aspects of the subculture: chess clubs, theme parties, even a match played against a prison inmate. But the most fascinating part of the book, the part that demonstrates just how powerful a hold chess can have over a person, is the author's trip to Kalmykia, a small province in Russia where the dictator is also a suspected murderer and a bona fide chess prodigy. In Kalmykia, chess is compulsory in school, and here the author finds "Chess City," a self-contained mini-metropolis dedicated to the game. Educational, fanciful, entertaining, this is a book that will make every reader see the game of chess in an entirely new--if slightly weird--light. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (September 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312272936
• ISBN-13: 978-0312272937
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,692,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

J.C. Hallman was raised in Southern California, and studied at the University of Pittsburgh, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, and can be reached at JCHallman.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Storytelling, September 21, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game (Hardcover)

"The train was all lullaby, the gyroscopic jostle of the tracks, the steady click of the wheels like the eighth notes of some slower melody, the stars stationary out the small window, all of it a lull of travel nostalgia, a cradle or warm womb, Glenn and I like twins incubating in that cramped space."

The Chess Artist is its own lullaby, a beautifully told story with the game of chess playing the role of train, cradling author Hallman and cohort Glenn in its ample belly as it propels them from the break room of an Atlantic City casino to the surreal backdrop of the Kalmykian steppe, "its beauty Martian, the chalky dirt solid on the ground but rising as dust as though evaporating".

I was captivated by the characters, sub-plots, and settings, with chess history weaving its way through the story like a consistent and traceable thread in a larger tapestry. Chess is a metaphor for obsession, but also for the complexity of human relationships and motivations. The friendship between Hallman and Glenn is its own civilized but at times antagonistic chess game, and it plays itself across the pages like chess pieces leaping across history and cultures.

Skillfully rendered (at times poetic, at times insightful and wry) The Chess Artist is a book for chess players and non-chess players alike!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better for its digressions than its story, March 27, 2004

By 

souldrummer (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game (Hardcover)

I've recently started a chess club at the school where I teach and I picked this book up to get some stories and tales about how chess exists in the world. The prose is very readable and there were several great stories. I enjoyed the one where they crash a games party at Princeton University especially. I also liked the vignettes on the history of each of the pieces. Many chess players play the game, but it's nice to have some background on how the modern game arrived at where it is today. This book is also unique in that most chess histories tend to focus on the major charismatic figures of the game. Yeah, Fischer is mentioned a little bit the travelogue aspects place a greater emphasis on how chess is experienced in the present.

This book falters a little big in its big theme, a visit to the Republic of Kalmykia, which is organized around a dictator's desire to make chess the driving theme of his republic. This was an interesting idea but I feel the author didn't focus enough of my attention on this story. An even greater flaw was the emphasis on the official version of Kalmykia's chess story. He spent a lot of time walking around Kalymykia and waiting for the dictator to grant him an official interview, but far less interviewing the experience of the everyday Kalmykian. I learned a little bit about FIDE, the international chess organization that Kirstan [the dictator] heads, however.

There aren't that many readable chess books out on the market so this has the advantage of squatter's rights to me. I'd recommend "Searching for Bobby Fischer" before this and this book as a follow up to getting a flavor of some of how chess is experienced today.

3.5 stars.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An overly dramatized mishmash, March 6, 2004

By 

David Gertler (Delaware, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game (Hardcover)

I was eager to read this book, but it fell far short of my hopes and expectations.

Hallman uses a writing style I find grating, in which nearly everyone and everything is described with exaggerated importance and strained analogies. As a graduate of some big-time writing programs, he probably feels he needs to use grand statements and highfalutin language to show his skills as a wordsmith. But there needs to be a contrast; if everything sounds important, then nothing does. It's like music at a constant crescendo.

Here's an example:

"Like an idea of God, chess would not fully succumb to the petty influence of organized veneration. Its purity would occasionally resurface, like statues crying or bleeding in odd corners of the world, a school, a monastery, a throne room, a prison. Its grand metaphor was something beyond politics and certainly beyond war or simple melee, but it was also beyond that which language was yet able to describe, and it was malleable, immune, and immortal."

This type of florid prose might work in a brief essay, but a reader faced with page after page of it will soon tire.

I'm a chess master (as is at least one previous reviewer); I know the game well, and I'm acquainted with many of the chessplayers mentioned in this book. (I've even played Glenn, the protagonist, in a rated tournament.) Those are reasons for me to like The Chess Artist. However, the prose is too thick; odd sequencing of events seems unjustified; and I fail to see the value of many of Hallman's actions or conclusions.

If there was some grand point being made, I've missed it.