Rating: 
Summary: A master storyteller's work
Review: The Royal Game is one of those outstanding books for which I say "five stars just isn't enough." When it came to portraying psychological turmoil, Stefan Zweig was incomparable. This book contains five of Zweig's stories -- each of which is a richly-detailed portrait of obsession. In the title story, a man imprisoned by the Gestapo struggles to maintain his sanity during endless hours of solitary confinement by playing mental chess. Instead, he descends into chess mania. This story deservedly ranks among the best in the genre of chess fiction. The protagonist in this story has a strength of character that makes his fate particularly tragic. The other stories in the collection are "Amok", "Letter from an Unknown Woman", "Fear", and "The Burning Secret". Zweig's insight into human relationships and feelings is particularly evident in "The Burning Secret." The story focuses upon the changes in a relationship between an adolescent boy and his mother who is struggling to cope with her loss of youth. The story is disturbing and remarkably realistic. It is painful to read and impossible to put aside. Zweig is underappreciated as an author. His characters are unstable beings who relentlessly torture themselves. Yet somehow, these characters' soliloquies never fail to touch the reader and to reflect the reader's own inner life. Zweig is so adept at translating emotions into words that it is easy to identify with all of the characters in a story, not just the protagonist. The only problem with this book is that it contains so few of Zweig's shorter works. However, this book is the best collection of Zweig's short fiction currently available in English. "Kaleidescope" is a much more comprehensive collection(it has thirteen of Zweig's stories and tales). Unfortunately, this work has long been out of print and was published before Zweig wrote some of his finest stories. Still, if you can find a used copy of Kaleidoscope, buy it in addition to The Royal Game. Both books are good reading.
Rating:
Summary: A master storyteller's work
Review: The Royal Game is one of those outstanding books for which I say "five stars just isn't enough." When it came to portraying psychological turmoil, Stefan Zweig was incomparable. This book contains five of Zweig's stories -- each of which is a richly-detailed portrait of obsession. In the title story, a man imprisoned by the Gestapo struggles to maintain his sanity during endless hours of solitary confinement by playing mental chess. Instead, he descends into chess mania. This story deservedly ranks among the best in the genre of chess fiction. The protagonist in this story has a strength of character that makes his fate particularly tragic. The other stories in the collection are "Amok", "Letter from an Unknown Woman", "Fear", and "The Burning Secret". Zweig's insight into human relationships and feelings is particularly evident in "The Burning Secret." The story focuses upon the changes in a relationship between an adolescent boy and his mother who is struggling to cope with her loss of youth. The story is disturbing and remarkably realistic. It is painful to read and impossible to put aside. Zweig is underappreciated as an author. His characters are unstable beings who relentlessly torture themselves. Yet somehow, these characters' soliloquies never fail to touch the reader and to reflect the reader's own inner life. Zweig is so adept at translating emotions into words that it is easy to identify with all of the characters in a story, not just the protagonist. The only problem with this book is that it contains so few of Zweig's shorter works. However, this book is the best collection of Zweig's short fiction currently available in English. "Kaleidescope" is a much more comprehensive collection(it has thirteen of Zweig's stories and tales). Unfortunately, this work has long been out of print and was published before Zweig wrote some of his finest stories. Still, if you can find a used copy of Kaleidoscope, buy it in addition to The Royal Game. Both books are good reading.
Rating:
Summary: A World Away...
Review: THIS publication marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of a writer who, as John Fowles remarks in his useful short introduction, has been all but forgotten since his suicide in 1942, but who was during his lifetime ''arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world.'' The quintet of fictions in ''The Royal Game'' are brilliant, unusual and haunting enough to ensure that Stefan Zweig's time of oblivion is over for good. The Vienna of Stefan Zweig was a world of bright, brittle superficialities, in which the bourgeoisie ''gradually elevated the eternal business of seeing and being seen to the purpose of their existence.'' To break through the facades of this society, Zweig developed a remarkable literary and psychological method, which is brought to something like perfection in the five long stories that make up this collection. Zweig's method was monomania. His central characters are all men and women possessed -by an amour fou or an adolescent hate or an ineradicable guilt or (in the title story) the game of chess. Narrowed by single-mindedness, they become knives which Zweig uses remorselessly to cut through to the dark heart of his superficially glittering world. The story that most clearly exemplifies Zweig's method here is ''Fear.'' Its heroine is Irene Wagner, a society lady, ''the wife of the best-known defence counsel at the law courts.'' She is having an illicit affair with a young pianist and, from the first sentence, suffering ''that senseless stab of fear,'' the fear of discovery. In ''Letter From an Unknown Woman,'' once superbly filmed by Max Ophuls, Zweig gives us another woman destroyed by love. A teen-age girl becomes infatuated with a writer who lives in the apartment across the hall, and she continues to love him throughout her life without his knowing it. She gives herself to him twice, once as a young woman and again years later. ''The Burning Secret'' returns to the theme of extramarital sexuality. This time the monomaniac is a young boy whose jealous and half-comprehending hate of the affair he senses between his mother and a philandering baron prevents the liaison from getting anywhere. 'Amok'' is another powerful variation on mad passion, and ''The Royal Game,'' perhaps the most extraordinary of all these tales, uses the game of chess as a terrifying metaphor for schizophrenia. A prisoner in solitary confinement begins to play an entirely mental game of chess with himself, in which he is obliged to divide his being in two, until this ultrasolipsistic feat brings him close to madness. In Zweig's hands, ''the royal game'' becomes a symbol of the tail-swallowing terrors of the life of the mind. These unique tales possess a resonance and a narrative force that make them compelling. Stefan Zweig was a dark and unorthodox artist, he was one of great power; it's good to have him back...
Rating:
Summary: A World Away...
Review: THIS publication marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of a writer who, as John Fowles remarks in his useful short introduction, has been all but forgotten since his suicide in 1942, but who was during his lifetime ''arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world.'' The quintet of fictions in ''The Royal Game'' are brilliant, unusual and haunting enough to ensure that Stefan Zweig's time of oblivion is over for good. The Vienna of Stefan Zweig was a world of bright, brittle superficialities, in which the bourgeoisie ''gradually elevated the eternal business of seeing and being seen to the purpose of their existence.'' To break through the facades of this society, Zweig developed a remarkable literary and psychological method, which is brought to something like perfection in the five long stories that make up this collection. Zweig's method was monomania. His central characters are all men and women possessed -by an amour fou or an adolescent hate or an ineradicable guilt or (in the title story) the game of chess. Narrowed by single-mindedness, they become knives which Zweig uses remorselessly to cut through to the dark heart of his superficially glittering world. The story that most clearly exemplifies Zweig's method here is ''Fear.'' Its heroine is Irene Wagner, a society lady, ''the wife of the best-known defence counsel at the law courts.'' She is having an illicit affair with a young pianist and, from the first sentence, suffering ''that senseless stab of fear,'' the fear of discovery. In ''Letter From an Unknown Woman,'' once superbly filmed by Max Ophuls, Zweig gives us another woman destroyed by love. A teen-age girl becomes infatuated with a writer who lives in the apartment across the hall, and she continues to love him throughout her life without his knowing it. She gives herself to him twice, once as a young woman and again years later. ''The Burning Secret'' returns to the theme of extramarital sexuality. This time the monomaniac is a young boy whose jealous and half-comprehending hate of the affair he senses between his mother and a philandering baron prevents the liaison from getting anywhere. 'Amok'' is another powerful variation on mad passion, and ''The Royal Game,'' perhaps the most extraordinary of all these tales, uses the game of chess as a terrifying metaphor for schizophrenia. A prisoner in solitary confinement begins to play an entirely mental game of chess with himself, in which he is obliged to divide his being in two, until this ultrasolipsistic feat brings him close to madness. In Zweig's hands, ''the royal game'' becomes a symbol of the tail-swallowing terrors of the life of the mind. These unique tales possess a resonance and a narrative force that make them compelling. Stefan Zweig was a dark and unorthodox artist, he was one of great power; it's good to have him back...
Rating:
Summary: A Psychological Tour de Force
Review: Zweig is a gripping storyteller and these stories are taut, atmospheric and psychologically astute. Zweig explores the human mind in the grip of obsession, fear, guilt, sexuality and suicide. My favorite of these five stories was "The Burning Secret", a brilliant exploration of the anatomy of the seduction of a married woman, with her young son the implement of the seducer's art. In the process we are shown the inner workings of a child's mind as it becomes aware of the hidden power of sexuality. Each story is gripping and beautifully written.
Rating: 
Summary: What's here is good.
Review: Zweig was the master of melodrama. Every single work of fiction that he wrote falls neatly into that style, and makes no bones about it. However, his melodramas were gut-wrenching, not sappy; profoundly moving, not sentimental; grief-inducing, not tear-jerking; sad, but not manipulative. Furthermore, his stories had the benefit of not being overlong, and they never dragged or repeated themselves, like his novel Beware of Pity tends to do. This collection contains some of his best work - surely the first and the last stories already are worth the price of admission. "The Royal Game" is a harrowing look at a little-known phenomenon known as "chess fever," an inexplicable but very real affliction, and remains the definitive portrait of same. The last story, "Letter From An Unknown Woman" has to be read to be believed. A Romantic (capital R) story of unrequited, lifelong, hopelessly fixated love, it is as close as Zweig ever came to writing an unadulterated masterpiece. Every word is pure gold. It's one of those things you'll wish you had written - and one that is inexplicably obscure, despite having been made into an American movie in 1948. The other three stories don't quite live up to that standard (and let's face it, few things can), but they're good, "Amok" especially. However, I must question what was going on in the head of whoever put this book together. What was the basis of the stories' selection? And why was it necessary to limit the book to only five of them? What sort of Zweig collection is it that includes "Fear," but doesn't include "The Invisible Collection," or "Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman," or "The Sunset of One Heart"? Huh? Huh? As long as you've set out with the noble goal of reprinting the wonderful stories of a sadly ignored author, you might as well do a competent job of it. If this book is supposed to fill the role of a Zweig Greatest Hits, it is woefully incomplete. It's sad, since it seems to be the only such collection in print, and since much of what _is_ in it is truly spectacular.
| 
