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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
At the opening of this amazing fiction -- "the best debut novel of the year", critics called it when it appeared in Italy in 1995 -- a cadaver is discovered, the body of an impeccable businessman from Vienna, in an elaborate garden where topiary shrubs delineate a hidden chessboard behind the hedges. Apparently the death is a suicide without plausible motivation, but as the plot of this passionately colored, coolly controlled thriller unfolds, we begin to see that its apparently random moves are "variations" on an opening gambit, which can end only in a checkmate that annihilates the possibility of a rematch. For the mortal duel around which the novel is constructed is between two chess players who are opposite human types -- a clever, persecuted Jew and a ruthless, persecuting German -- and when they face each other over a chessboard, the stakes are nothing less than life itself.
