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Zugzwang: A Novel
by Ronan Bennett
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (2007-10-30)
ISBN: 1596912537
EAN: 9781596912533
Dewey Decimal #: 823.914
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 288 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 2007-10-30
SKU: 01BB-051-7-0108
Condition: Near Fine
Comments: PAPERBACK ARC (ADVANCE READING COPY); Head of spine and one corner very slightly bumped - else Fine. *International Buyers Welcome!* (except for prohibitively heavy items, as noted) - Satisfied customers in over 40 countries! We ship quickly and guarantee satisfaction. Your purchase helps support a U. Chicago student
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
ZugzwangA chess term used to describe a position in which a player is reduced to utter helplessless: he is obliged to move, but every move serves to make his position even worse.
The breakout book from a celebrated literary writer: a thriller set in St. Petersburg in 1914 amid an international chess tournament and a series of mysterious murders.
Ronan Bennett’s new masterpiece of literary suspense unfolds in a city on the verge of revolution. On a blustery April day, a respected St. Petersburg newspaper editor is murdered in front of a shocked crowd. Five days later, Dr. Otto Spethmann, the celebrated psychoanalyst, receives a visit from the police. There has been another murder in the cityand somehow he is implicated. The doctor is mystified and deeply worried, as much for his young, spirited daughter as for himself.
Meanwhile, he finds himself preoccupied by two new patients: Anna Petrovna, a society beauty plagued with nightmares with whom he is inappropriately falling in love, and the troubled genius Rozental, a brilliant but fragile chess master on the verge of a complete breakdown. As Dr. Spethmann is drawn deeper into the murderous intrigue, he finds that he, his patients, and his daughter may all be pawns in a game larger in scope than anything he could have imagined.
Punctuated with board-by-board illustrations of a chess match that plays out through the book, Zugzwang is a masterfully written novel packed with cliffhangers, romance, unforgettable characters, and a plot that keeps readers guessing to the very end.
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Customer Reviews
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A Deadly Game Makes for a Good Read
Rating  (5)
Date: 2010-02-05
In German, zugzwang is a term used in chess to describe a position in which a player is reduced to a state of utter helplessness. The action is set in pre-Revolutionary Russia: St. Petersburg, 1914. Dr. Otto Spethmann is a psychiatrist who is drawn into a murderous intrigue and an intriguing romance. It's a deadly game, but good read.
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Super! Great story, and I'm not a chess player
Rating  (4)
Date: 2009-10-10
Loved this fun and muscular thriller that combines pre-Russian Revolutionary politics, the new field of psychoanalysis, romance and chess. I am not a player, but managed to get through some of the (mildly lengthy) moves described. Yes, I was occasionally irritated by them, but always wanted to find out what happened next in this brisk and capable thriller. And that's not an insult. The writing is excellent - free of stupid cliches of so many of the "action" novels of today. Characters are expertly drawn - especially the "character" of the famous city in which the book takes place. You truly feel you were "there." There, of course, is St. Petersburg, 1914, on the eve of one of the most notorious chess tournaments in history. Note: for those who have read (or are in the process of reading) this book, check out Wikipedia for information about the tournament. You will be fascinated by what you read; how closely the author follows the facts, including the real names of all but one of the players. I will let you determine which player in the "real" tournament is the tragic Rosental of the novel, whose family wanted him to renounce chess to be a rabbi. Just a hint: he truly was one of the most celebrated players of all time, and the most tormented.
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Good, but not great, historical thriller
Rating  (3)
Date: 2009-09-16
This is the first Ronan Bennett novel I have read. I was originally intrigued by the combination of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, the chess angle and the plot outline involving the main character, the psychologist Spethmann, and apparently unrelated murders just prior to the outbreak of the First World war.
Although it's not a lengthy read at well under 300 pages, the plot is, as other reviewers have commented, both convoluted and a little contrived. It also felt somewhat rushed and compressed: it would have benefitted, I think, from more plot and character development. The sex interludes actually could have come from another book and didn't comfortably fit with the 1914 milieu the author was trying to develop.
I still enjoyed it though, although the ending also felt rushed and a bit contrived. I thought the chess angle was interesting and brought substance to the plot.
For readers interested in mysteries/thrillers set in pre-revolutionary Russia, I'd recommend 'The Gentle Axe' by RN Morris, a novel based on one of the characters in Dostoyevky's Crime and Punishment, or The Boris Akunin 'Fandorin' books.
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Can there be a crime book with too many twists in its plot for its own good?
Rating (3)
Date: 2009-02-01
If so, then this is surely it.
I won't repeat here E. Bukowsky's outstanding summary: I couldn't add anything meaningful to it, and it would take up unnecessary space.
I think Bennet writes well, but that he got carried away away and tried to be too clever. No character in this gloomy thriller, save one, is at first introduced, and acts, as whom he will be finally revealed to be. I think it's a little too much for the narrative stability, and it gives the book an 'anything goes' atmosphere that renders it at times almost farcical, a comedy of errors.
It's a pity, because the research that went into writing it musn't have been minor: I don't mean the historical facts, but the details and mannerisms, which ring quite true and convincing (however, and despite the extensive bibliography Bennet cites, IMO the Okhrana chief and his minions are portrayed as too intelligent -as opposed to merely cunning- and sophisticated), and the somber mood. Some of his descriptions of the city are very good.
Another defect I find is that Spethmann, the psychoanalyst, is for most of the time (and especially at the beginning) portrayed as a scarcely credible imperturbable (a Jew in 1914 Russia!) nitwit: I don't mean in his acts but in his thoughts, to which, as the book is written in the first person, we are supposed to have unrestricted access. He also commits some unethical acts without undue inner regret, and his analysis techniques would have made Freud shudder.
For chess lovers (of whom I am one), there are two distinct aspects of this game presented in the novel: the first has to do with the eccentric genius Rozental and his preparations for, and match with, Lasker, which is germane to the plot but perforce unfortunately too schematic by far; and the second (which gives the book its title) is the personal confrontation bertween Spethmann and a friend, which is indeed interesting to examine in a purely chesswise way, but that, despite its dubious symbolic significance, isn't related at all to the main plot.
I have read a lot of scholarly books about pre and post-Revolutionary Russia, but this novel -despite the exagerations noted above- gave me the most vivid impression of the situation Lenin must have found when he arrived back from exile, sent by the Germans, and what it must have meant (and taken) to impose some sort of order into that unbelievable chaos and disintegration. In that sense, the Fascist and Nazi "revolutions" must have been child's play when compared to it. And this historical perspective, finally, is what makes the book worth reading despite its mediocre rating.
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"Rage & numbers will force the issue": chess, a thriller, 1914 Russia
Rating (3)
Date: 2008-12-24
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This title's a chess term for when a player must move, but wherever the next piece shifts, the position's for the worse. An appropriate metaphor for 1914 St. Petersburg, where the Okhrana, the Tsarist thugs, battle with Bolsheviks in the streets, behind bars, and within the ranks of a corrupted police force. As a Belfast native who spent two years at Long Kesh for charges related to terrorism for his youthful participation in demonstrations, the author works best here in the realms of brutality vs. humanity under pressure-- as with "The Catastrophist" and "Havoc, in Its Third Year" (both reviewed by me on Amazon). With a Ph.D in history, Bennett also integrates vivid descriptions of places under turmoil-- the North of Ireland in "The Second Prison," Latin America in "Overthrown by Strangers," post-colonial Congo and mid-17c England in his later two novels-- with fragile protagonists who find themselves trapped by circumstance, fate, and bureaucracy.
Beginning promisingly, with a faint tone of snobbery and distance by the narrator, a psychoanalyst, Dr. Otto Spethmann, the story opens with a comparison. The city juxtaposes squalor with elegance; violence pulses beneath order. "Just as a superficial glance at a chessboard on which a game is in progress will reveal little of the fierce struggle implicit in the arrangement of the pieces, so the tourist delighting in the treasures of the Hermitage, the glories of the Summer Gardens or the exotic wares on display at the Gostinny Dvor will likely be oblivious to the vicious currents coursing through the very streets he meanders in such innocent admiration. Of the eleven players who took part in the great tournament of 1914, only Rozental came fully to understand that cruelty and violent death were not just part of St. Petersburg in the way they are routinely in any great capital but were the very essence of a city stalked by revolution." (6-7)
A dramatic set-up, one that traps Spethmann in the machinations of spies, a lover, and his daughter's own predicament. However, as the novel's told in the first person, key scenes cannot therefore heighten the suspense as much as is needed for the plot to captivate. It's akin to watching yet another installment of a superhero movie; you know Batman will not die no matter how harsh his situation.
Not that skill's absent. Bennett works well with the one erotic scene he includes; he combines tact with detail deftly. Thoughts on how compassion for the poor and a desire to overthrow the system corrode as idealism meets realpolitik certainly continue a fictional and fact-based theme Bennett knows intimately. I liked the chess game that's illustrated as the novel progresses; otherwise, contrary to one's expectation, there's far less overlap between the chess and the rest of the story elements than the title might lead you to suppose.
The novel wraps itself up eloquently. "What do you do if you are born into misery and deprivation? How do you look at your firstborn and not curse yourself for having brought flesh of your flesh into this place? And for those of us not born as they are, who do not know the fields of weeping, is the question any less urgent?" (269)
And, it's prescient, not only for the Soviet revolution three years later. "Rage and numbers will force the issue." Bennett's consideration of how forces of law and order rot returns to his fourth novel. No crackdown can stop the "settling of accounts." The tsar and his ministers "could tighten the chains," by persecuting and jailing. "Or they could loosen the chains," but mollification will ease no anger. "They were in zugzwang. When things reach this pitch we are all in zugzwang. Past wrongs will never be forgiven. Rage and numbers will tell."
The plight of Polish Jews, as Spethmann in his assimilated position as well as his headlong flight from his upended security comes to recall with discomfort, runs through the plot as a hushed leitmotif that might have benefited more from prominence. The contrasts between the high life Spethmann and his circle of secularized Jewish professionals aspire to and the ghettos from which their fathers sprung remains a promising subject, but Bennett's protagonist gets so enmeshed in Tsarist-Bolshevik double-crossing, complete with guns and fists and chases, that the reader may tire of the staged action scenes. The writer means to explore a worthy clash between those who've made it and those out to get them.
On the other hand, these dueling characters get heaped up by the finale into so many coincidental collisions that this defies even the conventions of the genre. It's like an arthouse film turned megaplex thriller. So, the literary expression of this contest between coercion and revolution, repression and rebellion blurs into too many frenetic exchanges. There's not enough depth in many key characters to care enough for them. This gap between the ideas that support the Reds and their Jewish sympathizers or collaborators and the sordid realities of betrayal, bloodshed, and bluster widens, even as the characters get overwhelmed by the plot points. That being said, the hasty conclusion does hint to me of a possible sequel, which may allow some of the faults of this ambitious, if overly rushed, novel to smooth themselves out.
(P.S. Michael Johnson among other Amazon reviewers observed that there are incorrect chess moves noted. I was relieved if irritated to find this corroboration, as I kept going over the notation frustrating myself and blaming my own rudimentary knowledge for the blunders as diagrammed. This discrepancy's a minor but embarrassing flaw that should be pointed out before better chess players open these pages and follow the moves.)
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