Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"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!

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.

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.

This book is an interesting melange of chess history, personality, relationships and politics. Unfortunately the mix doesn't quite work out as well as you'd hope.

The main portion of the book is the trip the author takes to Russia, and then Kalmykia to investigate Kalmykian president/dictator and FIDE president/dictator Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. As in Heart of Darkness, things get more and more chaotic as they grow closer to their goal with the chess master falling apart from the stresses of being in an unfamiliar environment. The squalor of both Russia, and more so Kalmykia is well described and heart-breaking.

Really though nothing much comes of the trip despite the author's somewhat Don Quixotish quest to find something about a murdered Kalmykian journalist. The total surreality of Chess City just overwhelms everything else.

The interludes the author provides on the history and development of the game of chess are particularly well done.

The other portion of the book, modern chess in the USA is more about Hallman's relationship with both Glenn the chess master, and chess itself. Hallman becomes infatuated with chess, just as becoming infatuated with a girl but never really gets to know chess first-hand. Like admiring the girl from afar he gets his chess impressions through the characters found in the chess world particularly his friend Glenn.

Realizing he will never win the attentions of his new infatuation he becomes ambivalent, even hostile to both chess and Glenn, his attitude swings back and forth as he ponders the useful, or uselessness of chess while seeing what it has done to some people. This was quite interesting, his internalized love/hate relationship with both the game of chess and the chess world is familiar to many chess players.

The chess world is full of great characters and stories, and I think the book would have been stronger if he had followed Glenn throughout a few more tournaments rather than devoting so much to a fruitless quest ending in a very brief, but very scary, interview with Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.

The prose is quite readable, though at times a bit over the top. Hallman is even-handed, though not altogether sympathetic to his friend Glenn, and the world of chess and chess players.

On the whole, this work is very interesting, but very flawed. Like a chess game it was as interesting for what might have happened as for what was put down on paper. It is worth a look for the personal interrelationships on the dysfunctional Kalmykia road trip and the sequences about chess history as well as the US tournament scenes. Similar to Searching for Bobby Fischer the book is strongest when in the midst of the tension of a tournament and shows weakness when going overseas.

J.C. Hallman's The Chess Artist is structured around a trip that the author took with his friend Glenn, the chess player of the book's title, to Kalmykia, a crumbling Russian Republic on the northwest shore of the Caspian Sea. Hallman was interested in interviewing Kalmykia's despotic president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a former chess prodigy and the president of the World Chess Federation (FIDE), who was using chess "as a tool to unify and mollify his people." (He had made chess instruction compulsory in schools, for example.) Woven around the story of their journey are chapters on chess history--its development and geographical migration across a thousand years, the history of its individual pieces--and Hallman's further adventures with Glenn: marathon chess sessions over the internet, formal chess competitions, blindfolded chess and speed chess, chess played in prison and in Princeton, and the various characters they ran across on their adventures--child prodigies and the denizens of Dickensian chess shops and the down-and-out chess hustlers of New York's Washington Square Park.

Part travelogue, then, and part history, Hallman's book is also an exploration of both the international subculture of competitive chess and of his traveling companion. For most of the period covered by the book, Glenn was ranked as a chess master--exceptionally good but well below the grandmasters who form the true elite of the chess world. Glenn is an enigmatic character. A germophobic 39-year-old with a genius for the game and poor grammar, he is apparently incapable of consistently making smart decisions in the real world. Divorced and perpetually broke, almost childish at times, his friendship seems to be to a great extent a burden. Hallman has a tendency, actually, to write about Glenn as if he were a sort of lab animal, whose mannerisms and mode of play are alike under scrutiny.

"He shrugged and performed a gesture that was new to me, opening his palms suddenly and at the same time contorting his face to an expression of exaggerated surprise."

Annoying and strange, given to marking promising relationships with ceremonial whistling, Glenn is also a sad figure, a broken man "spiraling toward nothingness, a waste of twenty years of effort and energy." One wonders what Glenn thought of his presentation in the book.

The Chess Artist is very well researched and thick with information. And it is punctuated by some truly wonderful, sometimes poetic writing:

"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."

In Kalmykia Hallman is served "a genocide of crayfish"; in a prison cafeteria the fare is instead "hockey pucks of meat like the leftover scrapings of a botched autopsy." One chess player they observe has the "eyebrows of a demon," while another is "a nondescript man who fit the profile of a serial killer--short, well-groomed, quiet, and very dangerous."

Hallman's writing is riddled with such evocative descriptions. This is both wonderful and, surprisingly perhaps, problematic: the problem is that Hallman tends to lavish his well-written descriptions on nearly every minor character who crosses his path, so that the reader is met with too much information. Hallman's flair is obvious. But after a time, the personalities in the book tend to blend together.

It is tempting to say that Hallman does for chess what Stefan Fatsis does for Scrabble in his book Word Freak, exposing the weird underbelly of an intellectual pastime, the obsessives who sacrifice sleep and hygiene over their chosen game. Hallman's book, though, is a more serious and more difficult read. Presumably, the more familiar a reader is with chess, the more he will get out of the book. I myself do not play, but I was able to understand and appreciate, at least on some level, most of what the author had to say. Non-chess players should not be afraid of diving in.

Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

At first I did not know for certain how much a non chess player could get of this book; after all the very first condition to meet for a pleasant and/or useful reading is simpathy or familiarity -or neccesity- with the kind of environments and characters and events and issues that appears in it. Nevertheless, Hallman capabilities as a writer thouroughly wiped my doubts. His description of places, atmospheres, men and women, tournaments or of boring or weird nights in Kalmikya, as he did with any piece of info or trivia related with the universe of chess, are often masterpieces. He has the gift to offer great metaphores to describe poignantly a person, a room, an event. You can see, you even can smell a dilapidated GM fighting with his nerves over a board for a paltry price in a forgetable tournament and you can feel the emotions, ambitions and despairs of so many chess players lurking in the dark alleys of this cursed and fantasctic game. In the end, a great show of how much -and how deep- the piercing eye of a good writer can get and how far he can go. Hallman see the esentials and is capable of saying it in one or two lines. His reflections of the nature of chess, his history, his meaning are also entertanning and shed full light on this glorius game. Great reading.

"Not in any sport or game I have watched or played have I felt anything to quite match the visceral shock of a live chess game that descends into the hostile ballet of two players in time trouble. No extra inning, no hurry-up offense, no photo finish, no river card showdown quite imitates the intoxication of watching two players in an exchange that measures the extent of their wits and the intelligence of their fingers."

Like in this passage, writer Hallman approaches chess as a casual observer, acquainting himself with its history and making friends with Glenn, the quirky chess artist who is his guide. This book is about their friendship--a friendship that is like a chess game itself, sometimes tense, sometimes aggressive, and arriving eventually at a snapshot of a world I'd never seen before, but would like to now.

I recommend this book highly.

The book is 2 stories weaved together, ostensibly. Both the stories are about chess obsession. In one story the obsession impacts one person, Glenn Umstead, an african american master living in the US. In the second story the obsession impacts a whole country, Kalmykia. I say, ostensibly, because the story is J C Hallman's attempt to make sense of his life through the lives of people who seemingly have achieved perfection in some sense. A constant theme through the book is about developing your pieces, the book is evidently JCH's attempt at developing his pieces from a writing perspective.

There are stretches in the book, especially the Kalmykia pieces, which are fairly tedious. JCH does a poor job on reportage. He does a fairly good job of simplifying chess history and makes it interesting reading. The different sets/combinations (ta abiyas) in chess might be interesting, but in real life, prepared combinations like visiting Princeton, a prison etc. seems to be too prepared, lacking in touch.

Chess Artist is also a blitz summary of chess history and provides a good list of references for those interested.

Overall, I would recommend reading the book.

I really enjoyed this book. Hallman is prodigiously gifted, he has a hawklike eye for detail, a great talent for description and metaphor, a novelist's sense of momentum and organization and a heart ready to sympathize with screw-ups and strays. At their best his chess adventures reach a Huck and Jim pitch. He is an outsider writing critically about the appeal of the game and the lives of people who devote themselves to it. I think this is a great book for anyone getting into the game, or just looking for a thoughtful book.

As a 30 year tournament chess player of very modest success, I promise you this book is an accurate portrayal. I also happen to be acquainted with the author and know the central character fairly well. If you want to know about the world of chess, read this book.