The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game
By J. C. Hallman
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.
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
Review
...vivid journeys through the territories of friendship, passion for a game, and chess history. -- Boston Globe, November 28, 2003
Hallman's first has echoes of the new journalism espoused by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.... -- London Financial Times, October 4, 2003
[Mr. Hallman] has a flair for travelogue, reminiscient of Bruce Chatwin....a worthy and readable treatise of the chess scene. -- The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2003
Beautiful Storytelling
"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!
Fear and Loathing in Kalmykia
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.
An overly dramatized mishmash
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.
