A pleasure for fans of literary mystery—and of chess as well.
Furst meets Nabokov: an atmospheric blend of historical fact and detective-tale speculation against the backdrop of international chess.
First published in 2015 in Italy, this story is of a piece with Maurensig’s debut, The Lüneburg Variation (1993), in which Nazism meets the game of kings, with events reverberating long after the end of World War II. The story centers on Alexandre Alekhine, a Russian chess master whose antipathy toward Bolshevism led him to cast his lot with the Nazis. To what extent is a matter of much back and forth here, but Alekhine does not protest overmuch when Josef Goebbels, on playing a game with him, calls him a “friend of the Reich.” Ah, but then, Alekhine uses a defense in his game that owed to a Jewish predecessor, thinking it a fine irony that “right under the eyes of Reichsminister Goebbels, a Jew should poke his head out, grinning irreverently and making fun of them all.” Alekhine’s story unfolds through the eyes of a curious investigator, Venezuelan by birth, Italian by nationality, Portuguese by descent, a student of chess who considers Alekhine “a tutelary deity” but blanches at his awful anti-Semitism. More than 60 years after the fact, he travels to Portugal, where Alekhine had found himself marooned after the war, to look into the grandmaster’s death. Was he, as investigators held, the victim of accidentally choking on food? Passing himself off as a journalist, the protagonist finds other possibilities, including a carefully developed plotline that places Alekhine against the backdrop of the newly emerging Cold War and a vengeful Joseph Stalin. For Alekhine, even facing that fateful last supper of beef stroganoff, the game extends beyond the chessboard, a matter of cat and mouse to the end: “Deny, always deny, even in the face of the most glaring evidence.” Maurensig could just as easily have written this as a work of nonfiction save that his narrative frame allows him to play freely with alternative theories.
A pleasure for fans of literary mystery—and of chess as well.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-27380-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
