Chess Book Review - The Immortal Game, by David Shenk
My journey through the stacks and piles of books in the Pittsburgh Chess Club library continues; after learning about the significance of the queen piece in chess – both on and off the chessboard – I wanted to keep up the momentum and find a book that would help me to dive deeper into the dramatic stories and lore of the game’s origins. After some not-so-focused perusing I stumbled on this gem, another short but very sweet text from the mid-2000s; I wonder in what weird way chess was breaking through the cultural zeitgeist to warrant so much consideration by such well-read individuals. In any case, here’s to learning something I don’t already know!
The game of chess is over 2000 years old; during that time, it has crossed deserts and oceans, survived the rise and fall of dynasties, the Crusades, the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars, a Cold War, and the rise of the Digital era to land in the pockets of millions of fans in cities all across the world.
Even if you’re not a chess fan, just objectively, you’ve got to admit – that’s a pretty impressive streak. Not many things that mankind created have lasted this long with so little intervention. Set parallel with the course of human history, chess – for all intents and purposes – really does appear to be a game that is incapable of being forgotten. It simply refuses to sink into the annals of history.
But why? And how?? Just what is so enticing, so magical, so everlasting about these little icons on this checkered grid? In his book, “The Immortal Game: A History of Chess”, award-winning author David Shenk attempts to answer these two simple yet complicated questions. Shenk introduces himself as an outsider to the world of the game, save for a brief encounter in his youth, and admits that he initially found the scale and complexities of chess overwhelming. He only began to “tumble down the rabbit hole” after he began looking into the family history of a long-lost relative, a Mr. Samuel Rosenthal, a Polish-Jewish player of some renown during the time of Napoleon. It was not long into his research before chess had, by his own admission, engulfed him: “...much to my wife’s dismay, I got hooked. It is an intoxicating game that, though often grueling, never grows tiresome… Other parlor games sufficiently amuse, entertain, challenge, distract. Chess seizes” (pg. 6). As Shenk delved deeper into the life and achievements of his great-great grandfather, he also learned more and more about chess’ impact on human culture, and attempted to pinpoint the secret to chess’ staying power.
One of my bigger pet peeves with this text was equal parts content and formatting: to juxtapose his points on the elusive sublimity of chess, Shenk a couple of pages in-between chapters to share a dramatic re-telling of the book's namesake, the so-called “Immortal Game”, played by masters Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in London 1851. While this is undoubtedly one of the biggest moments of Romantic chess history, this reader is not so sure that newcomers to the game and its lore will find the game engaging enough to appreciate these abrupt segues. Even as a fervent chess fan and voracious reader - I'm very familiar with this game and its outcome - I still ended up skipping these segments entirely. However, the author does think to include this within one of two appendices that include more short games of note (with diagrams), along with excerpts from chess writings from notable figures like Ben Franklin, and others; I think that this is a much more appropriate spot for the game instead of clunkily placed in front of each chapter.
The author separates his argument into three parts (titled Opening, Middlegame and Endgame - I’m only 3 books into this blog series and this “trend” in chess literature is already getting old) - the first Part containing chapters that highlight the history of the game of chess set parallel to human culture. After a brief recap of the game’s origins in India and its penchant for allegory - even in its infancy, Chess apparently never failed to inspire - we move on to Persia, where chess becomes inextricably linked to and evolves with the expanding empire and the Islamic Renaissance that followed afterwards. With Islamic law as a guide, the game saw some of its first changes - namely, no representational pieces and no playing in public - but remained the rich tapestry with which thinkers in the 9th century illustrated life. Shenk writes, “The bedrock ethic for chess enthusiasts would forever be intwined with the ethics of the Muslim Renaissance. Knowledge, said the Prophet, ‘guideth us to happiness; it sustaineth us in misery; it is an ornament amongst friends, and an armor against enemies’” (pg. 38)
This trend continued as chess proliferated across Europe, spreading to Spain, Italy and Scandinavia between the 9th and 12th centuries. Not only was it popular with nobility and craftsmen, but with the clergy as well, who utilized the game as a metaphor for living in one's place under God, be it politics, morality or romance: “...chess became woven into the fabric - and literally tiled to the floor - of Christian medieval European society” (pg. 51).
After highlighting some of the final changes to the core game’s rules in Chapter 4, we move on to Part 2, which focuses mainly on chess as the “fly on the wall” on some of the biggest moments in European politics beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. From Napoleon’s brooding over chessboards in La Regence Cafe in Paris, to Ben Franklin using chess during his talks with the British Empire, to chess as a symbol for excellence for two competing political regimes, the game was still being used by various cultures to highlight and exemplify human thinking and values. He also takes a couple of pages to touch on the conjectures drawn between chess mastery and madness - both real and imagined - throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Part 3 of the book details hot topics for chess in the 20th and 21st centuries: namely, chess and machine intelligence, and its ability to improve the human mind. While fewer individuals today would espouse the game’s ability to bring the soul closer to a higher power, most today would agree on its positive affect on memory and cognitive thinking. These topics may undoubtedly be the freshest in the reader’s minds and the subject carrying the most merit for debate, especially given the recent boom in chess’ popularity. By helping us view these questions within the context of the whole of chess history, our author shows us that this is not a contemporary debate by any means.
In roughly 200 or so pages, David Shenk present a vivid and compelling argument for why chess has not lost much of its permanence over the last 13 or so centuries that it’s been furrowing brows and stumbling minds. His dramatic and engaging prose pulls you along through some of the most poignant moments of human history. Newcomers to chess lore will find more than a few intriguing tidbits, but readers will have to decide for themselves if our guide has properly answered the principal question. In his words, “A mystery that will quite likely never be solved can nonetheless be a rich vein of inquiry.” It seems that he hopes the reader, like he, dares to dig just a bit deeper.
This was a very interesting read, and much more engaging than the last book I read; this book flew by in comparison - though it certainly did not feel as comprehensive or as dense as Mrs. Yalom’s work. Mr. Shenk also has a flair for the dramatic, which shines through the whole of the work. Overall, I give this one a 4 out of 5 - a very fun read that you’ll be done with faster than you think!
