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How to read in anxious times

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Things have escalated really quickly, haven’t they? I don’t know what the situation is in your country, but the UK has gone into full lockdown today. I think most of us are in the stage of finding it surreal – unless we know somebody directly affected, of course, and then it’s all too real. I’ve not been outside my house and garden for a week, and the only human contact I’ve had has been virtual or (at a safe distance) with neighbours over the fence.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably had a few people say that you can finally read all your books -I’ve been saying it to people too. There’s definitely no shortage of books to read around the house. At a conservative estimate, I have over 1500 unread books.

And then there are the lists of books to read during lockdown, appearing in blogs and newspapers and so forth. They’re great, and Rachel has put together a wonderful list.

I hope you’re finding the lists helpful. I hope you are able to get down to some books you’ve been meaning to read.

But I’m writing this for the readers who are struggling to work out how to read at all.

I certainly have plenty of time to read, though I’ve also been having an unprecedented number of phone and video calls. But I am finding it difficult to read anything very much at the moment. I sit down with a pile, intending to change between them and have a nice evening of reading – and I’m only a few paragraphs in when I realise that I haven’t taken in anything. My mind, like all of our minds, is on coronavirus. About what the future looks like.

And it’s not just that. It’s the scary amount of choice, and the scary amount of time. Usually I grab something and read it on my lunch break, or after I come home from something, or for a few hours on a Saturday. Now I have seemingly endless time and seemingly endless options. It’s overwhelming.

I’m trying different things. I picked a light 1920s book. I picked non-fiction essays. I picked Pride and Prejudice. And I am getting through things, slowly. I’m even enjoying them – Lucy Gayheart, the Willa Cather I’m currently reading for the next episode of Tea or Books?, is brilliant. But it’s not coming easily.

And I wanted to share this to say – if you haven’t worked out how to read at this moment, that’s OK. It will probably come as we get used to this new normal. And if it doesn’t, that’s ok too. Your mind is doing all sorts of backflips and cartwheels. There’s no guilt if nothing is distracting you.

There’s also no guilt if you have to go to a pile of Agatha Christies, or re-read books you loved as a child, or only read magazines. If you’re not using this opportunity to read War and Peace, don’t worry. Reading can be a wonderful lifeline at the moment but if – like me – you’re finding it a lifeline that sometimes gives way, and you just need to watch Netflix for a bit, then know that I’m in the same boat. For now.

British Library Women Writers #1: The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair

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The first lot of British Library Women Writers reprints are out! And in this uncertain and scary world, I think this series is more vital than ever, in these difficult times – bookshops are probably closed now, but the British Library are still delivering from their shop and lots of local indies are still doing postal delivery.

If you missed my announcement a while ago – this Women Writers series is reprinting novels by and about women from the first half of the 20th century, and I’m lucky enough to be series consultant! I’m also writing the afterword for each one, picking out a particular contemporary issue in the novel. For The Tree of Heaven, I wrote about suffragettes. I’m a bit nervous about my afterwords being out in the world, and hoping that people enjoy them – though of course the main thing is the novel itself.

I didn’t choose these first couple of novels, The Tree of Heaven and My Husband Simon – though they’re great – but I did choose the next batch. More on those soon! As they become available, I’m going to be putting up reviews.

The Tree of Heaven was published in 1917, and it’s always interesting to read a novel published during a World War, because obviously the author doesn’t know how or when it will end. It certainly has an effect on all the members of the family at the centre of the novel: there are four Harrison children, Dorothea/Dorothy, Michael, Nicholas/Nicky, and John. Sinclair is clever in the way that uses each of them to embody something major going on at the time, without making them seem too much like stock characters or simply there to represent a theme. Michael, for instance, is in the aesthetic set – all poetry magazines and being anti-patriotism – while Dorothea gets swept up in the suffrage movement.

They grow realistically from children to adults over the course of the novel, and there is a middle section called ‘the vortex’ where each of them finds that their particular interest or allegiance might lead them into a ‘vortex’ that removes their individuality:

For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex […] She was afraid of the herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the clearness and hardness of her soul.

There’s a lot going on with signing up – or not signing up – to fight, and there’s a subplot about the disputed parentage of another character. There’s a lot going on and, being the 1910s, there is a slightly heightened emotionality to everything – but Sinclair weaves all the strands together really well. I think she’s better at women than men, or at least I found more to engage me in Dorothea’s uncertainty about whether the means justifies the ends in militant suffragism than I did in the different boys’ decisions about whether or not to fight. Not that that isn’t an important discussion, but it felt like Sinclair was a little less invested in it herself, and it’s high and low points lean a little closer to emotional cliche.

But it’s a really engaging, enjoyable, and moving novel. If you’ve only read Life and Death of Harriett Frean then there is a great deal more to love about Sinclair – and this one isn’t as melancholy, though it certainly isn’t a chuckle-fest!

I promise my afterword was more thoroughly researched and diligently edited than this outpouring of thoughts late on a Sunday night ;) – something to compare and contrast if you do get a copy! I’ll be back with more on the other books in the series soon – and revealing which books will be published in the series in the autumn [though if you’re impatient, they’re all in the British Library catalogue and listed on Amazon already].

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Haven’t had one of these for a while, but I think we need some things to cheer us up. Here are three that have caught my attention recently…

1.) The link – is to the site of Simon Palmer, an artist whose work I saw shared on Twitter. They’re country scenes that combine a sense of the magical with a firm understanding of nature. If I saw any of them on the cover of a novel, I’d want to read the novel.

2.) The book – it might seem like an odd time to read about a serial killer, but Dean Street Press have recently reissued Israel Rank by Roy Horniman – under the title of the more-famous film it became, Kind Hearts and Coronets. I’ve not started it yet, but I loved the film many years ago so am looking forward to exploring.

3.) The blog post – I was part of a little group encouraging Ali to try the wonderful Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. And, hurrah, she did!

A trip to Scotland [the other bits]

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A few of you asked to hear more about my Scotland trip, and I am very happy to oblige! Gosh, it feels a million years ago now. I do hope you are all keeping healthy, physically and mentally, in this strange new world. I’m self-isolating at the moment, as I have cold symptoms and don’t want to take chances with the health of people around me. Living on my own, I’m going to especially appreciate the online book world this week – and for the next weeks and months.

Anyway, back to Scotland! All the photos in this post are by my friend Will, one of the people who went on the trip. I can definitely recommend taking a talented photographer with you on hols! It’s definitely nicer to have an album of images of this quality, rather than the blurred pics off my phone.

This is the rather extraordinary place that I went with my brother and four friends – yes, we had the whole thing to ourselves.

My room was on the top floor on the right – the fourth floor or the fifth floor, depending on whether you’re English or not! Yes, a lot of stairs, and possibly the old servants quarters – but what a lovely little room. I say ‘little’ – it’s much, much bigger than my bedroom at home, but all the other rooms are so enormous that it felt small.

We’ve been way as a group three times, and we take it in turns to cook – but tend to get a takeaway on the first night. Finding someone willing to deliver to a castle in the middle of nowhere wasn’t the easiest, but we did land upon a very nice curry place (and got so much food that we could have lunch the next day too). Col and I made toad-in-the-hole on our day, which is a family favourite meal and which I seldom have, as it doesn’t make much sense to cook it for one. We battled through the combination of vegetarians and gluten-free people! Luckily we had one person who’d been to boarding school, and thus will eat anything, food or otherwise.

The reason we’d gone up to Dumfries and Galloway was because of its proximity to Wigtown, the bookshop town. It was a first trip there for all of us, so I don’t know how much it’s changed over the years. This time, there were six bookshops, I think – some of which are only open half the week, so we naturally had to go twice.

Going back to Hay-on-Wye many times has a slightly melancholy aspect – because there are fewer bookshops each time. Maybe that’s true in Wigtown. But I had an encouraging chat with a bookshop owner called Ruth, who had only been there for eighteen months. Her shop was delightfully cosy, with a sofa covered in blankets and the feel of being in a very bookish person’s [large] living room.

But, yes, the main attraction was The Bookshop, where Shaun Bythell works. Several of us had read The Diary of a Bookseller and its sequel, Confessions of a Bookseller. Listeners to ‘Tea or Books?’ may remember that my friend Lorna came on the show to talk about it – the self-same Lorna is in this pic, with me [right] and her husband Will [left].

We all wanted to meet Shaun but, as anybody who’s read his book or follows the shop on social media knows, he has a reputation for being scathingly funny. I was rather terrified that I’d blurt out something idiotic and then have to wait a few years to find myself in print. But – we did meet him, and he was very nice. I was buying a copy of Diary of a Bookseller there, because I wanted a copy which quotes my Shiny New Book’s review, and he offered to sign it for me. Lorna mentioned that I was quoted in it, which I was too nervous to say, and he was also nice about that. Phew! We got through it without making fools of ourselves. And we bought a nice pile of books between us.

Unsurprisingly, my brother did not buy any books in there. He’s used to doing crosswords in the corner of bookshops while I hunt. But he did buy one book in a different bookshop – the one that is rented as an airbnb, so you run a bookshop on holiday. It was Michael Palin’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in case you’re interested – and above, here he is in a bookshop, actually the one in Carlisle, holding another actual book. [No, apparently this is The Book Shop – thanks Rebecca!] Wonders will never cease!

It was such a wonderful holiday. Other than books, we mostly read, chatted, played board games, and went for a walk to the coast. Until the tide came in, and then we had a scramble onto a golf course, and a walk along that…

I’m so glad we managed to go before coronavirus lockdown happened. I know we’re really lucky. I’m thinking of and praying for you all. Here’s to sharing lots of the joy of reading while we wait for what happens next.

A trip to Scotland [the books I bought]

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I spent much of this week in a castle in Scotland, which was a rather wonderful way to escape the coronavirus headlines – this castle, to be precise. There’s a group of us who try to get to a Landmark Trust property at least once a year, and this location was chosen because it’s not far from Wigtown. That’s the Scottish equivalent of Hay-on-Wye, and the book town made famous by Shaun Bythell’s Diary of a Bookseller. Many of the group love his books and were keen to meet him – as well as a little nervous, in case we said anything stupid and ended up in a sequel.

On the way up, we stopped in Carlisle and went to the extraordinarily good Bookcase bookshop. I hadn’t been for quite a few years and had forgotten how enormous it is. Not the cheapest, but a real Aladdin’s cave.

Anyway, between the Wigtown bookshops and Bookcase, I came away with quite a haul. Here we go…

Three Things You Need To Know About Rockets by Jessica Fox
If you’ve read Bythell’s book, you’ll know about his on/off American girlfriend Anna. Well, turns out Anna is Jessica and she wrote a book about moving to Scotland and helping run a bookshop.

The Finishing Touch by Brigid Brophy
I’ve still only read one book by Brophy, but… now I can read more.

Middle Class by Sarah Gertrude Millin
I’ve never heard of Millin, but I’m increasingly on the look-out for books that could be contenders for the British Library Women Writers series. Which means I’m buying a lot of obscure books and not reading very many of them…

Rose Under Glass by Elizabeth Berridge
And the only Berridge book I’ve read is her short stories published by Persephone, but I’ll add another to the shelf.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather
I thought I already had this, but when I was looking for a copy for the next episode of Tea or Books? I realised I did not. Well, too late now for that episode, but good to have on the shelves nonetheless.

The White Riband by F. Tennyson Jesse
All I know about FTJ is the two books Virago published by her – of which I’ve read only the brilliant A Pin To See The Peepshow – so it was fun to find another.

I’m Not Complaining by Ruth Adam
Speaking of Virago, I’ve seen a lot of love for this Virago Modern Classic over the years, so thought it was worth nabbing a copy.

The Cheval Glass by Ursula Bloom
I’ve only read Bloom under her Mary Essex pseudonym – and I’m delighted that Tea Is So Intoxicating will be one of the BL Women Writers reprints in the autumn. This one has a fantastical premise and you KNOW I love a fantastic premise.

Calypso by David Sedaris
I also love Sedaris! Always happy to add another of his hilarious and observant essay collections to my shelves, though it’s been too long since I read one.

Twenty-Five by Beverley Nichols
Some would argue that 25 is too young to write an autobiography, but Nichols alleges it’s the oldest age that one should. It’s a tongue-in-cheek statement, of course, and this looks like it’s more about the period. His book about the 20s written from a distance, The Sweet and Twenties, was my favourite the year I read it – this one is more up close.

Raspberry Reich by Wolf Mankowitz
I really like the offbeat charm of A Kid For Two Farthings and Make Me An Offer. This one looks heavier on the offbeat than the charm, but I’m keen to give it a go.

Turnabout by Thorne Smith
Thorne Smith is one of those names I’ve seen around for many years and never really explored. Bookcase had a big and inviting pile of his books, and I was quite tempted just to buy them all, but I thought I should exercise restraint and try just one. Smith usually does comic, fantastic books, and this one is a body-swap comedy. What’s not to like?

Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford

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When I read Business As Usual (1933) in January, it was difficult not to write about it immediately. But there are few things more irritating than reading about a delightful book and then finding that it’s not yet available to buy – and while there are doubtless 1933 editions of Business As Usual out there somewhere, you can now buy the lovely Handheld Press reprint of it. At https://taxfyle.com/blog/can-i-deduct-my-medical-expenses/ you will find purposes of the medical expenses deduction. And if Handheld Press never achieve or achieved anything else, the rediscovery of this novel would secure my eternal gratitude.

I was pretty sure I’d love it when I heard the barest outlines: it is a novel in letters from the 1930s about working in the book department of a department store. I might as well stop my review there, and some of you are probably ordering a copy as we speak. But it’s even better than it sounds.

All the letters are by Hilary Fane, and we must imagine the replies (and are easily able to do so from her replies). She has just finished university and is engaged to a pleasant young man called Basil. Being the 1930s, she is preparing to prioritise the doctor’s role of wife once she is married, and Edinburgh society is ready to receive her in this role. It (and her parents) are rather more surprised when she decides she wants to wait a year, get a job, and see something of the world. Off she goes to London.

Here, she manages to find an overpriced, unlovely flat (plus ca change!), and begins to realise that life alone and on the job market isn’t quite as simple as she’d hoped. But she takes it in good part. Hilary is such a delightful character – it’s so hard to create an optimist who isn’t annoying, but Oliver and Stafford have done it. She refuses to be crushed down, but does allow the odd acerbic moment to sneak into her letters – not least when she begins to prove people wrong:

Basil Dear

I meant to write to you last night, but I waited, because I thought there might be a letter. And there was – a very sweet one. Bless you! But I don’t think one enjoys: ‘I told you so’ however beautifully it’s put. It isn’t true either I’VE GOT A JOB. So I won’t be coming to heel just yet.

It’s always fun to read about people being out of their depth, and Hilary’s first job in Everyman’s (a department store clearly based on Selfridges) is as a typist in the books department. If you’ve enjoyed Monica Dickens’ hilarious One Pair of Hands or Betty Macdonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, then you’ll know what to expect. She is initially enthusiastic and confused and inept – and later just confused and inept. This clearly isn’t her forte. Oliver and Stafford don’t diminish those who are good at this sort of routine-work, and Hilary admires them with an open heart – but it is not where she should be.

As she comes to the attention of the manager, Mr Grant, when dealing with a difficult situation, she is given the more responsible task of improving the organisation of the department. Her rise through the ranks is a trifle unrealistic, but we’ll forgive it because it gives such a fascinating insight behind the scenes of this lending library feature of a bookshop that has long disappeared.

Her life begins to shift in interesting ways, and not always the ways I anticipated when I started reading it. What remains consistent is how funny, joyous, and addictive Business As Usual is.

I often write here that I’m looking forward to rereading a book, and it’s relatively seldom that I actually do end up rereading. But I’m going to say with confidence that Business As Usual will join the pantheon of those books I return to when I want to read something that will put a broad smile on my face.

Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley

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For my second book for Lizzy and Karen’s Fitzcarraldo Fortnight, I read Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley – a very, very short 2015 book. It’s 92 pages in total, but the last fifteen or so of those reprint a David Hume essay on suicide. So Critchley is covering an astonishingly complex subject in very few pages. So this will be an equally brief review!

Not only that, he says he wants to do it from personal, philosophical, literary, religious, and moral angles.

It’s a tall order and, of course, he only scratches the surface. And I think it was best when he nudged towards the personal – not necessarily his own life (though the book opens ‘this is not a suicide note’) but other individuals, famous or not. He looks through the common themes of suicide notes, and considers them almost as art. They appear in the narrative to illustrate Critchley’s point, or to divert the paragraph into a different direction, even though we seldom know from where or how they’ve been selected. For instance, Critchley described this as one of the most poignant suicide notes he’s read:

Dear Betty,

I hate you.

Love, George.

I found the sections on moral philosophy a little less interesting, because they are rather cursory and abstract – and have obviously been considered in rather more detail elsewhere. He can hardly hope to plumb the depths of the topic in a handful of pages. But even a moment like his question ‘Why do we find suicide sad?’ can lead to all sorts of other questions in the reader’s mind, to contemplate in their own time.

And somehow the mix of the intimate and the global, the detailed and the distant, make Notes on Suicide a brief but captivating book. It barely touches the surface of what could be said about it, but it still made me think more deeply about this difficult and curious topic. And that’s probably one of the best things you can ask of an essay.

In The Dark Room by Brian Dillon – #FitzcarraldoFortnight

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When Karen and Lizzy announced that they’d be doing a Fitzcarraldo Fortnight, I thought it would be a great opportunity to read some of the Fitzcarraldo Editions I’ve been bulk buying since I read the brilliant The Little Art by Kate Briggs. And I decided to start with one that’s been on my shelf for a year or so – In the Dark Room by Brian Dillon, originally published in 2005 and published as a Fitzcarraldo Edition thirteen years later.

The book is about memory and about grief. Dillon is looking back on the death of his parents – his mother, from a long and horrible illness that affected every part of her body, slowly killing her; his father, from a sudden heart attack. And he starts in the house that he is packing up, a few years after his father has died and after disputes with his brothers. The starting point is the memory that is held in objects, in houses, in the things that surround us – and the mixed blessing this can be for a family that has always had an anxious undercurrent, with things unsaid and other things too hastily said.

The first section is on houses, and the book opens as though we were being directed to the house. It’s impossible to write about houses and memory without quoting Gaston Bachelard, and perhaps without feeling that Bachelard already did it all perfectly in The Poetics of Space – but Bachelard wasn’t anywhere near as personal as Dillon. His writing is raw and doesn’t shy away from difficult emotions. It is also filled with brilliant, pithy moments like this:

A house changes after somebody has died: there is suddenly too much space.

In the Dark Room is constantly on the fine line between beautiful, observational style and being overwritten. I’ll admit: every time I picked it up, the sentences seemed over-wrought, always using the longest words where shorter ones would have done the same…

I have gradually surrounded myself with objects which trace the most random pathways into the past I am now trying to map. I feel myself dispersed, fragmented among these relics, quite unable to fit them into a logical sequence. I can dimly imagine such a story; a whole narrative, properly autobiographical, a propulsion towards the sort of self-knowledge that can conceive of itself as some kind of culmination.

Here’s the thing, though. After a paragraph or two, I always found that I had adjusted my mind accordingly. I lifted it to his register. And, perhaps because it is so consistent, it very quickly didn’t jar at all. My colleague John came up with the perfect analogy – it’s like swimming in the sea, that the cold only hurts for the first few minutes.

The title of the book is, of course, a reference to the place where photographs are developed. And this isn’t just a metaphor for the way in which memories gradually gain or lose clarity – there is a lot in the book about the few photographs that Dillon has of his parents. He cannot relate to the families who have albums full of them – he has a mere handful from their lives, and uses these to describe their lives, their relationship, their milestones. He makes the best of his paltry research materials, using their very insufficiency as inspiration.

I say ‘he cannot relate’ to them – there are quite a few times Dillon seems almost cartoonishly unable to relate to other people’s experiences. One that stuck out bizarrely to me is his mother’s Bible – she has highlighted a passage from 2 Corinthians that is a beautiful, wonderful passage about God’s grace and His ability to work through imperfect humans, and Dillon can’t comprehend that it could bring her joy. He is unable to see past his own prejudices. Similarly, we know that he has a fraught relationship with his brothers – but we never really learn why, or what they might think, or what led to it. They are his parents’ children too.

On the other hand, he is mesmerically good at writing about illness. The slow revelation of the illness his mother had, and the way in which he enables the reader to understand the frustration, agony, hopelessness that she must have felt, is done brilliant,y – and illness is notoriously difficult to convey, let alone at one remove.

So, In the Dark Room is perhaps a book of paradoxes. A deeply personal book that retains unexpected hiding places; an insightful book that can be oddly closed-minded; a beautiful book that takes time to adjust to. Overall – yes – a triumph that is as flawed as any individual, and both as patchy and as affecting as memory.

Another Trip to Astley Book Farm

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I spent years wondering why I hadn’t been to Astley Book Farm, and now I seem to go at least once a year. And I’m certainly not complaining! The other day I went for the third time and I didn’t come away empty-handed. Or empty-stomached, because the cake there is incredible and the toasties and soup are also incredible. Seriously, even if you hate books, you should go for the food. But also why are you reading this book blog.

I bought four books – and a couple for other people. It’s not an enormous number, partly because the turnover isn’t massive, but I’m really pleased with them all. Here goes…

Banvard’s Folly by Paul Collins

Paul Collins’ book about Shakespeare’s First Folio was my favourite read of last year – and I also read his book about Hay-on-Wye, Sixpence House. In that book, he talks quite a lot about the writing and editing of Banvard’s Folly – which is a book about ‘renowned obscurity, famous anonymity, and rotten luck’. Or, to cite its working title, Losers. But apparently it was thought that wouldn’t fly in the US market.

A Letter to Elizabeth by Bettina Linn

Since I got asked to come up with suggestions for the British Library Women Writers series, I’ve been keeping an eye out for more obscure titles that could be promising. I hadn’t heard of Linn or this novel, but I was drawn by the cover – which you can see here. The description of it sounds quite complicated, involving the illegitimate child of an anthropologist, polio, and affairs that might be renewed.

Father Malachy’s Miracle by Bruce Marshall

You know I love a novel with a fantastical premise – and this one is about a feud over the possibility of a miracle, which leads to a ‘rowdy dance-hall’ being transported to the Bass Rock in the Firth or Forth. And then the band manager decides to sue. I am always here for a novel that uses supernatural things in a wry way.

The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden

OK, Simon, you loved Molly Fox’s Birthday but you should stop buying so many books by her without reading any more of them. This is the last you can buy without reading more. Be STRONG.

Incidentally, the other book I got this week was from my friend Leen – Menfreya by Victoria Holt, with a garish schlocky cover, that is apparently good fun. Aaaand let’s try to have a whole week without buying a book, Si.

A Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

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Stefan Zweig is rather brilliant, isn’t he? A Chess Story [also published as Chess and A Royal Game], from 1941, is the third Zweig novella I’ve read and the best so far – a really astonishing achievement in so few pages. Translated by Alexander Starritt, I should say – someone at my book group had a very different translation, based on our comparison of the first few lines, but it hurts my head to think too much about the variations that are possible with different translators at work.

I didn’t know anything about A Chess Story when I started it, and I was very glad about that. It made the whole experience so much more surprising and revelatory – so part of me wants to tell you to stop reading this review and just get a copy. Preferably the gorgeous Pushkin Press edition I have. But I’ll keep going anyway.

The large steamship leaving New York for Buenos Aires at midnight was caught up in the usual bustle and commotion of the hour before sailing. Visitors from shore pressed past one another to take leave of their friends, telegraph boys in skew-whiff caps shot names through the lounges, cases and flowers were brought and inquisitive children ran up and down flights of stairs while the orchestra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flash-bulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us – it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure.

The narrator is an interested and friendly man, but we don’t learn all that much more about him. Rather, he is there to introduce us to other people – to be the intrigued onlooker, always ready to give backstory when necessary. Zweig breaks all sorts of narrative ‘best practice’ rules, or what we would now consider rules, and somehow gets away with it. For example, he jumps from this present moment into a full history of the celebrity in question: Mirko Czentovic, chess prodigy.

We learn that Czentovic came from poverty and was considered unusually stupid. He barely communicates, and doesn’t seem to take an interest in anything. Except one day he reveals himself to have a preternatural ability for chess. One thing leads to another – Zweig tells it very well – and Czentovic is now a big deal. He’s also a mercenary, and will only play chess if it’s monetarily worth his while.

A competitive man on board the ship, and the narrator, manage to get together a group who are willing to put together the price. And it looks like the hubris of the amateur and the arrogance of the professional will be the story here. It would have been a good story. But, in the middle of the second match, someone joins the crowd of spectators. And, diffidently, he calls through an instruction. It quickly becomes clear that he is brilliant at chess himself – but once the match is over, he doesn’t want to play again.

Dr B is his name – and the second half of the novella becomes about something completely different. I won’t say what, though it’s easy enough to discover online if you want to. It’s about how he became so talented at chess – and why he doesn’t want to play again. Frankly, it’s astonishing.

All the more astonishing is how vividly Zweig creates two worlds – the ship and this other world that I won’t say too much about – in only a hundred or so pages. He could have made it a novel of three times the length, but there is a great power in his brevity. It says more about its time than novels ten times as long; I suspect it will stay in my mind for a long time. I’ve seldom read a better portrayal of mental illness, and the final chess match in A Chess Story is one of only two times that a sport has held any interest for me – the other being the cricket match in The Go Between.

If you’ve never read Zweig before, this is a great place to start. And I’m keen to get as many more as I can.