One of the first things that every novice chess player learns is the Touch Move Rule. If a player intentionally touches one of their pieces, they must make a move with this piece if such move is legally possible. Several years ago at a family dinner, the Argentine writer Ariel Magnus learned that his grandfather, Heinz Magnus, had kept a diary – and once Ariel had touched that notebook, Chess With My Grandfather was set in motion. Yet the world of chess, or rather, the aura of chess as a world, even more than Heinz Magnus himself, is the novel’s central substance.
Heinz began the diary in 1935 while living in Hamburg, preparing to emigrate with his Jewish parents to Argentina; they arrived in August, 1937. Ariel initially wrote an unpublished nonfiction text inspired by the notebook, and in 2006 he published a book about his grandmother Liselotte. But only after he discovered that the 1939 World Chess Championship occurred in Buenos Aires did he find the proper context for a narrative about Heinz, a chess aficionado whose favorite novelist was Stefan Zweig, the author of Chess Story. Mirko Czentovic, the Zweig novel’s young prodigy, also makes a cameo appearance in the novel.
Ariel never met Heinz who died at age 52 in the early 1950s. He is portrayed in the story as a yearning spirit, agitated by unfulfilled literary aspirations, and perhaps depressive. But Ariel lavishes more attention on Sonja Graf, an actual German competitor and author of a book on chess, who aspires to compete against men, is pursued by them (including Heinz), and who expresses sometimes conflicting notions about her mode of playing the game. Other famous chess champions also appear, often attempting to erode each other’s confidence. [Right: Sonja Graf]
The championship takes place in September, 1939, just as German forces invade Poland, and France and England declare war on Hitler. Ariel portrays a series of games and various maneuvers among country teams to gain an advantage or avoid playing against certain offensive antagonists. The lacunae of chess become the main event. Inevitably, the reader begins to inquire into the link between the mechanisms of chess and the decisions Ariel Magnus makes as his novel unspools.
Chess With My Grandfather is a speculative novel, a hybrid of history and conjury. “What’s the point of writing novels if they just repeat what happened in real life?” Ariel asks toward the end. “It would be like two players arguing over a completed game but instead of imagining new alternative moves, just repeating the game as it happened, like spent historians or record keepers.” The postmodernist’s usual attitude about fiction. But rules are rules: you touched it, and what you do next must inevitably lead toward either satisfaction or failure.
In an interview at World Literature Today, Ariel Magnus says, “I think change, striving for something new — even knowing that it can only be wishful thinking — is a kind of honesty. What you should at least aspire to when you do something you care about. But perhaps it’s just an instability of mind, an insecurity of style.” That sudden doubt about style is present in the novel, just as Sonja Graf experiences flares of uncertainty: “Her tea-leaf style of predictions tended to miss the mark and trusting them often distracted from the simple complexity of how the pieces themselves were arranged.” The chess player imagines a series of moves that could lead to a win – but she doesn’t really know what makes one decide this or that to begin with. Such is the mystery that Ariel Magnus wants to radiate from the pages of Chess With My Grandfather. Determination versus provisionality. Strategy versus luck.
Ariel Magnus writes with verve and a comedic flair – his diction and tone often combine to sound Nabakovian. In fact, he seems rather too dependent on this lively, inquisitorial, sometimes glib talkiness – all of which is captured in Kit Maude’s vigorous translation. Is chess a sport as well as a game? Is novel-writing a game as well as an art? Magnus touched the diary and then simply proceeded. The dense presence of chess in the narrative makes it difficult to discern if he actually got anywhere. On the other hand, not having a destination – in a world where war and persecution seem destined — may be both his mode and his point.
[Published by Seagull Books on August 4, 2021, 312 pages, $24.50 hardcover]
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In Grammars of Creation, George Steiner calls Ludwig Hohl (1904-1980) “one of the secret masters of twentieth-century German prose.” Written between 1934 and 1936 but not published until 1944, The Notes (Die Notizen) is Hohl’s magnum opus, comprising 832 pages of aphorisms, assertions, dreams, recollections and descriptions of daily life. The manuscript consists of over 3000 slips of paper. When the first volume of Die Notizen sold less than 200 copies, his publisher canceled the second and final volume. So Hohl sued and won. Nevertheless, the second book sold just as poorly. In the 1970’s, after another publisher resurrected Hohl’s works, his unique accomplishments were finally recognized by writers such as Max Frisch, Peter Handke and Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
Hohl was born in Switzerland and spent his twenties in Paris, Vienna and The Hague where in “extreme spiritual isolation” he produced the first draft of The Notes over a three-year stretch. In 1937 he returned to Biel, then moved to Geneva where he lived penuriously for years in “a cellarage or below-street level cavern” until a small inheritance arrived in his later years. Alcoholic and stubbornly unemployable, he was married five times and had one daughter. He continued adding to and editing The Notes for four decades, stringing its pages on a clothesline in his basement. In a forward, Joshua Cohen writes, “He’d finish a page and then decide where to hang it, clipping, reclipping, trying to find the perfect order, or at least trying not to give up on the hope of a perfect order.”
His obsession was “his philosophical conceit of Arbeit or work,” notes his translator, Tess Lewis, “by which he meant the unrelenting and wholehearted use of one’s creative energies.” Literary output and critical recognition disinterested him. He published some poems, stories, essays and novellas, and his one novel, Bergfahrt (Ascent) was written in 1926. So what exactly did he mean by “work”?
“While writing – I write one to four finished pages a day in four, six, or eight hours – if I manage to write at all; unusually no more than two pages and rarely more than three. This cannot be of interest to anyone. But what is remarkable is this: I almost always have the sense of having written ten or twenty pages (and then, astonished, I have to confirm the count in order to dispel the illusion); yet this is easily explained: so vast are the expanses I cover while writing.
“The writing, what is visible, is only the summit or the ridge – but I walked through the mountain range, climbed mountains, and descended into valleys, I have searched through the entire range.”
The grandeur of this solitary, cerebral practice overshadows everything – especially “the pharmacists,” Hohl’s disparaging epithet for standard issue bourgeois barbarians. For the truly engaged reader, he would offer The Notes, described by Lewis as “a meticulously ordered compendium of over a thousand observations, anecdotes, reflections, recollections, mini-essays, and quotations.” He organized them under chapter headings such as “On Work,” “On the Accessible and the Inaccessible,” “Talking, Chattering, Keeping Silent,” “Dream and Dreams” and “On Death.” Furthermore, he believed that the sequencing he laboriously devised would yield a revelation. “But I’m here to tell you this isn’t true,” writes Cohen, “that you’ll be confused no matter what you do, whether you skip around or read through page by page.”
I agree with Cohen that Hohl’s arrangement isn’t as significant as he projected – but I disagree with the charge that our confusion is inevitable. For Hohl, the true summit for the writer is the path uphill itself. But then, he will trouble the path in one of his notes: “In the mountains. We saw the paths of others, brilliantly illuminated, but not our own.” And later, another: “Where one can conceive of something, a path will appear sooner or later.”
In violation of Hohl’s insistence that the notes be read in order, here are some samples — though most entries are longer, usually beginning with a thesis or accusation, then elucidating his own remark:
“And that is why the only ones who deserve our sympathy are those who still desire change although all change is for naught – they desire it in order to maintain what is unchanging.”
“True work would be like the melody of an organ if the melody of an organ were to create ever more and ever greater organs. Yet how can it be that all this suddenly ends in death? This – is not at all the case. After all, in connecting with everything we have ever more of the opposite of death. Work is nothing other than translating what is mortal into what continues.”
“There is only one misfortune: having nothing to do or being forced to do something false. Any activity that does not increase the abilities of the one performing it is a false one.”
“Human grandeur – human hope; the way to greatness – lies in the recognition of our insignificance, of our relativity, that is, our relation to the unfathomable night that surrounds us, not in the mastery of it, not in the mastery of the whole, but in the neatness with which we align our existence, in the precision of our own machinery. Man is like a small clock lost in the inorganic chaos of the Sahara. His grandeur lies in the precision and rectitude with which he functions. And in the light he sheds on his small circumference.”
“The greatest sorrows are always secret ones. Yes, in my experience, always and without exception. From this it is clear that one way to overcome one’s sorrow, or at least lessen it, is to acknowledge it, to oneself first and foremost. Since almost every sorrow, as soon as it is seen clearly, proves to be one that many others share, it is then alleviated to an even greater extent because as its visibility increases, it is even easier to bring it out of the shadows.”
“The expression ‘to master one’s subject’ is completely meaningless. A writer is no more able to master his subject than an ocean liner is able to master the water.”
“Those who work in the realm of the intellect and the spirit always work on credit.”
The figure of Ludwig Hohl brings to mind Orphée in Jean Marais’ film who, when asked by the Judge to say what it means to be a poet, replies, “To write, without being a writer.” Although preoccupied with the structure of his notes, Hohl never actually found a genre-shape for his fiction to embody his conceptual assertions — not that he rues this lapse. The Notes are full of engaging critique – but the lyrical impulse is diluted by disgust, and Hohl has little to say about his immediate world. However, he took “his small circumference” seriously – and his assertions point toward avant garde literary values that emerged after the war. Although he hectors and harasses, a vast generosity is also at play: he won’t give up on us. “He was an absolutist whose thinking was both thorough and provisional,” writes Lewis. “In fact, it was thorough precisely because it was provisional.” Her rendition of The Notes is a remarkable achievement – expressing the ardor and intensity of Hohl’s uncompromising assessment of both our creative potential and habitual inanity.
[Published by Yale University Press on October 19, 2021, 392 pages, $37.50 hardcover]