Customer Reviews

Chess Garden

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Chess Garden is simply one of the best books I have ever read. The protagonist deals with many issues confronting every one: spiritual ambiguity and conviction, passionate love, tragic loss, and one's sense of place and community. The novel moves in three timelines: the doctor's growing up in Europe and courtship of his wife, his imaginary tale of Gulliverian wanderings in the mysterious land of Antipodes, and his hometown of Dayton 13 years after the doctor's famous letters from abroad. I wanted to restart it as soon as I finished it!

I've read "The Chess Garden" only once, four years ago. But a week rarely goes by when my heart and mind don't return to it. I don't pretend to grasp all of its themes. But as a parent, I found deep meaning in this book, wherein God's presence is revealed most fully in the love we feel for our children. And our experience of this love then allows us to turn outward to others, more completely and authentically. Mark Helprin's "Memoir from Antproof Case" touches on this theme, but not with the same power. The Doctor's spiritual quest after the death of his young son rang so emotionally true, so heartbreakingly real, that I've been unable to read it again. (Though I'm sure I will eventually) It's a sad and hopeful book. For those of us who struggle with doubt and strain to glimpse a loving, personal God, we should spend a few summer afternoons in The Chess Garden. Of course, it's only fiction. It merely points the way to what we all have access to, every day, in our real lives.

There is so much to this novel, it almost defies description. Part tragic love story, part allegory, and part Apology, it has the beauty that so many modern novels lack. Hansen's language is gorgeous, and his thoughts inscribe a circle around such far-flung matters as the Christian Church, Arthurian Legend, how to deal with the pain of losing a young son, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Novels like this only come along once in a very very long time, and even though I have written nearly twenty pages for an assignment and read it a dozen times, there are still parts to this that haunt me, to the point where I want to pick the novel up again every once in a while just to savor the parts I love, look anew for threads I have missed, and immerse myself in the language and times of the mid and late 19th century. It is, and will remain one of those books on my 'Books to read once a year' list.

A friend of mine insisted that I read this book, and after examining the slip jacket, I reluctantly agreed. However, once I started I could put it down. This book is both a literary marvel as well as a fascinating spiritual commentary. The story is captiving, and the imagery is brilliant. I would recommend it both to the child and to elder. Read this book.

This novel by Brooks Hansen joins a small and diverse group of volumes on my shelves, books that I would take with me to the proverbial desert island if I could only have five: The Bible, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, Freddy's Book by John Gardner, and now, The Chess Garden. (Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld got bumped. Both McKillip and Hansen create magical and evocative worlds; however, if I were faced with fifty years and only five books, the richer soil of the Antipodes would yield more for me to savor than that of Eld.) In his book Hansen tells the story--stories--of Gustav Uyterhoeven, a Dutch/English doctor born in 1823. He presents his fictional protagonist's chronological history within an exciting historical context, a period when such fields as epidemiology and sociology were expanding dramatically, when Darwin was making his discoveries, when the Victorian fascination with spiritualism was spreading on both sides of the Atlantic, when the Boer War was dividing South Africa. The painstaking research that obviously went into the writing of this novel is never obvious in the sense of being intrusive or artificial; rather, Hansen has constructed an elegant and utterly convincing reality, peopled by such historical figures as Rudolph Virchow and Madame Blavatsky. But parallel to this reality is the land Gustav describes to his wife and friends in letters he sends home to Ohio from the South African camp where he ends his life treating Boer prisoners of war. These letters have nothing to do with the historical landscape Uyterhoeven inhabits. Instead they deal with his dangerous journey to, and adventures in, the mysterious island of the Antipodes. This magical world is populated entirely by game pieces, some of which become Gustav's friends, and each letter describing his journey is accompanied home by one of the pieces, which is placed by Gustav's wife in the chess garden the two have created together. The link between Gustav's two realities is the figure of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th century philosopher and mystic (whose life, incidentally, bore some resemblance to Gustav's). The weaving together of the historical and the psycho-spiritual aspects of Uyterhoeven's life is accomplished magnificently in Hansen's narration. Gustav's spiritual explorations encourage the reader to embark on her own journey. This book may not be a 10, but it is certianly more than a 9!

The Chess Garden is a wonderfully generous book. Brooks Hansen could have stretched his beautiful ideas into a career of short stories and novels, but he gave them liberally to this book: origami paper knights fighting dangerously in a tree whose flowers are lit candles, a monastery where monks piece together autumn leaves like puzzle pieces, a secret organization of vandals who scheme to destroy the very Platonic forms.

Most beautiful is a long creation myth for the Antipodes, a land inhabited by game pieces. The myth tells of a jealous aristocrat whose silver-haired family washes the silver from their hair into a lake, causing a star to stop in its path and keeping a baby prince, the rightful king of the land, from growing up. It tells of a girl named Evelin, blind and deaf from being hidden in a well, who together with the baby king, brought forth the "totem" game pieces into the land. It's too long and complicated and beautiful to summarize well; you must read it.

The Antipodes parts of the book, the "twilight letters" of Dr. Uyterhoeven, are interspersed with other story-lines: the Doctor's youth, training and courtship in Europe, the Doctor and Mrs. Uyterhoeven's later life in Ohio, and the Doctor's real experiences in the Boer Wars. Chess, mysticism, homeopathy and opium figure in the Doctor's experiences, and Hansen has a wonderful talent for conveying a warmth and familiarity in the Uyterhoevens and their chess garden, without losing the fantastic and philosophical character of the Antipodes adventure.

Really this is one of the best things I've read.

The author is so generous with his creativity. Each small episode contains a novel's worth of invention, and some scenes are amazing and unusually beautiful. Also, the book works on several different layers of fiction. You get so used to the Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy of the Antipodes that, by contrast, you find yourself wondering if the Doctor's well-documented history (with convincing footnote citations) could be factual.

A fairly complex plot line that blends a "reality plot" with one of fantasy. As the plot lines merge, I finally started to piece together the subtle lesson the book had been trying to teach me all along - the value of life and celebrating it in a variety of ways.

As a reader, I don't typically go for the "feel sorry for myself/the Fates are against me" storylines. I do read books that deal with serious, even sad, subject matter, but I seem to react better to those than aren't more of a pity party to which I've (mistakenly) been invited. I don't say this as a good or bad thing, only as an indication of my taste. From that indication, you might better judge my opinion of this book, which is very high, by the way.

The story begins as a reminiscence by a widow of her deceased physician husband and how they both dealt with the loss of their son. While this sounds depressing and, to use one of my strongest condemning phrases, angst-filled, it actually handles both issues in a way that left me . . . shoot, how do you describe a sad topic that doesn't leave you exactly sad? Hopeful?

So, with that in mind, I loved this book. If I can't describe the plot well, maybe I can do better with the book itself . . . it is impressive and at times, fun. It will slow at points, but hang in there. It'll be worth it in the end.

I cannot think of a better summer read. You get sucked into the book by the pure pleasure of the fantasy but then discover that as you have been busily digesting the tasty story, you are also ingesting healthy morsels of philosophy and faith. Of course, this is probably what Dr. Uyterhoeven (aka Hansen) intends all along, much like the way I hide my dog's medicine in a piece of cheese. I greatly enjoyed this piece of cheese and feel all the more enriched by the medicine embedded within it. Pleasure and insight mark a truly great book.

A wonderful read, unsettling in places. Living a satisfying spiritual life without submitting to dogmatic spiritual practices or intellectual decisions, as demonstrated by the life of this (closet homeopathic) pathologist. He discovers Swedenborgianism on his sickbed out in the bush, and the author uses it as a springboard to remind us: usually the way we learn important things about how we feel is recognize/realizing the truth of what we already sensed being true. The chess garden of the title is the place he and his wife let the community create in their back yard, and is the splendidly austere but lush place which shimmers as a hidden pocket of learning.

The thing I was reminded of by the good Doctor is that I should live my spiritual life visibly for my 5-year old son to witness now if I want him to listen later if he asks how one goes about living their life. I hope he asks the question. If I am not here to answer his question, I hope he finds this book to help him recognize his answer. The sadness I encountered midway made me put the book down for a few days in reflection, be aware that real living can make you do that too. Don't let it stop you from picking it back up and finishing. The illuminating conclusion reminds me of Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale" and the C.S.Lewis "Narnia" stories.