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    Zugzwang
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    Zugzwang
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    Zugzwang
    Ebook318 pages8 hours

    Zugzwang

    By Ronan Bennett

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    St Petersburg, 1914. Dr Otto Spethmann, a famous psychoanalyst, is implicated in a murder. But he is preoccupied with Avrom Rozental, the brilliant chess master who is due to play the most important competition of his life but is on the verge of a breakdown. With the city rife with speculation and alarm, Spethmann broods over his own chessboard, its pieces frozen mid-battle, and contemplates the forces - political, historical, sexual - that are holding him in their grasp...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateOct 17, 2012
    ISBN9781408807163
    Unavailable
    Zugzwang
    Author

    Ronan Bennett

    Ronan Bennett was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His novel The Catastrophist (1997) won the Irish Post Literature Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. Havoc, in its third year (2004) won Irish Novel of the Year and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His recent work includes the feature film Public Enemies in 2009 and the television series Hidden (2011), Gunpowder (2017) and Top Boy (2011–present).

    Read more from Ronan Bennett

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    3/5

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    • 3/5
      Zugzwang is a term used in chess to describe a position in which a player is reduced to a state of utter helplessness. He is obliged to move, but every makes his position worse.This book is set in 1914 pre-revolution St. Petersburg where Dr. Otto Spethmann is a prominent psychoanalyst and widower living a comfortable life with his daughter, Catherine. Otto is apolitical but when a newspaper editor is murdered in broad daylight and an apparent car accident turns out to be a murder he is drawn into a world of political manoeuvring and intrigue when his business card is found on one of the victims. The novel's action takes place over a few days' time, during which Spethmann meets a bewildering array of characters ranging from police officers and undercover agents of the Interior ministry to Bolshevik party activists and oligarchs with their own ulterior motives.Meanwhile Otto's personal life is undergoing a major upheaval life due to two of his patients. One Anna Petrovna, a married woman with whom he is falling in love with and developing an unprofessional relationship. The other, Avrom Rozental, a Jewish chess master, visiting the city from Poland for a major chess tournament. Rozental is on the verge of a mental breakdown and fixated on his up-coming matches but for some reason the police seem to be unduly interested in his movements.Zugzwang is a thriller that centres on the choices that Otto must make as he and his daughter are buffeted by forces that are far out of their control. All the choices they make seem to put them more and more at personal risk.Running throughout the book is a long-running chess game played between Otto and a friend. Otto contemplates the moves and counter moves that his opponents will play. As events in the novel heat up, so does the chess game. This is a side dish that will no doubt thrill chess enthusiasts but should not be enough to put off non-players from enjoying this novel. I found it well written and fast paced with plenty of twists and turns (a few too many for my taste) but if I'm honest it didn't have enough about it to really stand out from the crowd.
    • 1/5
      A bit weird!