"The immortal game" by David Shenk
A review of the best and only book of chess history I have ever bothered to read.
This month, as I browsed the iBook store for some new eBook to buy, I came across a title that against all reason I felt compelled to read. That eBook was “The immortal game” by David Shenk.
I have little interest is Chess, though I have played it occasionally with family and on computer. Yet despite this, when I saw this book of chess history, I just had to buy it. And I have no regrets.
Most people have a fairly indifferent attitude to chess, if they think of it at all. It is a calm, abstract, academic game that for most people is honestly more a symbol of being an intellectual, or a child Prodigy, than it is a game. This book is the antidote to this common misconception, revealing not only the long and detailed history of chess, but its cultural, philosophical and even technological significance.
The author of this book, like many of us, had little interest in chess despite playing it occasionally during his childhood. That was until his mother sent him some old newspaper clippings about his famous chess playing grandfather, Samuel Rosenthal, along with some impromptu chess games with an old school friend, finally compelling him to study the game he had long abandoned. Mere months was enough to reveal that there is a reason chess scholars exist. I shall now very briefly and generally summarise some of the history David Shenk has written in this book.
1,400 years of existence has granted chess an amount of contemplation and interaction that few boardgames in existence have the privilege of receiving, the fruits of which consist not only of a thorough and vast presence across the Earth, but hundreds of stories of which it is the star, hundreds of variations in how it can be played, hundreds of problems which it alone contains, and hundreds of ways in which it has been used as a metaphor or tool for understanding and exploring the world.
For instance, of the many stories of chess that have been recorded, most seem to have obsession as a theme, such as the tale of that famous artist Marcel Duchamp who grew so enamored with chess that not only did he divorce his wife when she glued the pieces to his chessboard in retaliation for giving more attention to them than to her during their honeymoon, but eventually abandoned Art itself in favour of it, choosing to spend his remaining decades studying the pieces for hours at a time rather than use the paintbrushes that made him famous to the world.
And rather than coming into the world fully formed, chess spent its many centuries evolving into the form we recognise today, and many others, just as the Horse in its many breeds began with that dog-like Eohippus and gradually developed from there. Gradual changes to the rules of how the pieces move were made to transform chess from being a rather leisurely and slow-paced game to the much quicker and intense beast we play today. But besides the standard there were, and still are, many odd variants of chess. In the Middle Ages, for an example, there was a variant that used dice to choose which piece to move in order to stop games from dragging on too long.
Of course, merely playing the game is a fraction of its entertainment value. The myriad ways that the pieces could move and interact with each other permit to formation of “Chess Problems”, questions concerning the ways they could move into a certain formation whilst following various constraints. “The Knights tour” is one of the most famous, asking how one can move a Knight across the board, so it lands on each square only once.
Eventually a person must realise that thinking of chess as a physical object to move around is also merely a fraction of its power, for it also is one of the most powerful metaphors for representing the world in abstract form. According to legend, from its very conception Chess was intended to be a metaphor for human beings navigating the world. According to an Indian legend, two successive kings asked a philosopher to design a game, The first king told the philosopher to create a game that would symbolise humanity subject to fate and chance. The next day he was presented with the ancestor of Backgammon. When that king died, the second king told the philosopher to make a game that symbolised humanity using Free will and intelligence to deal with the world, since he hated the fatalism expounded by the first king. The next day the philosopher presented to him the ancestor of chess.
From then on people came up with many more ways to use chess as a metaphor for representing the world, and for probing it. In medieval Europe chess was a such popular metaphor for thinking about society and morality that a for a time the 2nd most popular book after the bible was a book of sermons that both discussed Morality using chess as a metaphor while also being a chess-manual. More recently, chess was used as a tool to explore intelligence, both human and artificial. (I should mention that David inevitably discusses that momentous chess match between Kasparov and the AI Deep blue.)
As you can see, from the very general and incomplete outline, the history of significance of chess is vaster than most imagine. But now, I should get back to discussing the book itself, rather than its subject-matter.
It is a very enjoyable book to read, engagingly written and a lot easier to read through than I expected, finishing the book within a week. In regard to the books structure, each chapter is followed by a play-by-play description of one of chess’ most famous matches, “The Immortal game” that gives this book its title. the book also has numerous interesting notes and an appendix consisting of a brief summary of the rules of chess, another summary of 5 famous chess matches and an essay by Benjamin Franklin concerning the game.