Language: Dutch. English translation (The Tea Lords) here.

Rudolf Kerkhoven leaves his comfortable origins in Delft by ship to help run the family's estates in the Dutch East Indies. He moves from plantation to plantation, attempting to understand the ways of the local peoples, and their relationship to their land. On a visit to the capital, he falls in love with a teenage girl, Jenny Roosengaarde Bisschop, who he courts surreptitiously via his sister, with grave consequences for the reality of their relationships. Eventually they marry, and make a hard colonist-couple's life theirs, bear, lose and raise children, before Jenny on her visit to the home country discovers all the comforts of which she has been deprived in Java. Back at the plantation homestead, as the back-breaking work of establishing and maintaining business takes its toll on Rudolf, Jenny becomes estranged from him, and the bitter resentments of relatives eat at her until a terrible solution is achieved.

This book gives great insights into the mindset of the Dutch colonists in the East Indies. The book is based on private correspondence and documents from The Indies Tea and Family Archive and also from clearly substantial records from various family collections. Haasse, at the end: the material in the book is "not invented but chosen and arranged to meet the demands of the novel".

Every one of two years, I pick up a novel by Hella S. Haasse (1918-), the grand lady of Dutch literature. Haasse combines a nice style with a very sophisticated and utterly sympathetic posture.

 

 

Language: English.

In the summer of 1972, with a presidential crisis stirring in the United States and the cold war at a pivotal point, the Soviet world chess champion, Boris Spassky, and his American challenger, Bobby Fischer, met in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the most notorious chess match of all time. Their showdown, played against the backdrop of superpower politics, held the world spellbound for two months with reports of psychological warfare, ultimatums, political intrigue, cliffhangers, an farce to rival a Marx Brothers film. Bobby Fischer Goes to War - How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine is a very well researched account of an unforgettable matchup.

For both the American and the Russian government, winning was of utmost importance. The Russians influenced chess up to the highest political range - there was nothing Spassky could do without it being exactly noticed. Spassky nevertheless, was a sportsman in the first place, an tried to find his own way into beating Fischer. Fischer didn't let anybody influence him or his team of muppets, although President Nixon tried to get some of the success.

The biggest chess match ever was played under strange circumstances: the soft-tempered Russian and the rebellish American weren't trusted by their influential governments, and thus fought their own battle inside a political chess game.

Language: German. English translation here. Dutch here.

Check! This is the first part of a chess-doubleheader on Read52. Or is it? Zweig himself was a bad chess player and the game is not deeply analyzed or explained. This (posthumously published) novella is more about interpersonal relationships, people in unfamiliar environments and the roamings of the mind.

On a passenger ship, travelling from New York to Buenos Aires, an Austrian immigrant gets to know that Mirko Czentovic, the reigning world champion, is aboard. Czentovic is an orphan, raised by a priest, and therefore a low profile man ruling an intellectual world. He sells his services to amateur players, which is not done in chess etiquette.

When a rich oilinvestor named McConnor finds out that Czentovic is aboard, he puts the needed money on the table. Czentovic takes on the challenge to play, not only against McConnor, but against all spectators at the same time. Czentovic wins. During the revenge match, an unknown stranger prevents the group from losing again. Dr. B, as he is introduced, turns out to have an unusual relation to chess: in captivity during the war, he stole a book with famous matches. In his fight against boredom in prison Dr. B. started studying every match from beginning to end. During this process, Dr. B. was able to split his mind into a white-I and a black-I.

Dr. B.'s knowledge comes to use against Czentovic, but only to a certain level.

Language: German.

The short Leo Richters Porträt is fiction and non-fiction combined. In the first part of the book, Leo Richter, a psychotic writer who also was one of the main protagonists in Daniel Kehlmann's Ruhm, is being followed by a journalist. The journalist is working on an intimate portrait of the rather frightened and doubtful Richter, penetrating him with questions on every imagineable topic. The first sentence translates like this:

A magazine wanted to publish a portrait of Leo Richter: eight pages, two big images, maybe even his picture on the cover. Without hesitation, Richter accepted, and immediately felt sorry.

The second part is an integral feature from the German weekly Die Zeit. Adam Soboczynski portraits Kehlmann in his home cities Berlin and Vienna. Soboczynski gives us a great view of Germany's Wunderkind, whose career didn't start with the success he experiences now.