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I didn't like this much. Partially because the idea of the chess game and the self-imposed dual personality was the hook and while it was executed well, I wasn't grabbed by the notion. It would have had a lot more resonance in 1942, I think, both as an exposition of emotional brutality and because the outcome of the battle between good and evil was by no means assured.
But what really bugged me was how Zweig personified good vs. evil. "Good" is the representative of the ancien regime; someone who had benefited mightily from inherited position and weath. "Evil" is the brutish, illiterate peasant and, very annoyingly, the nouveau riche Scottish American engineer shared a lot of physical and personality traits with him. Money is good, but only if inherited, eh? Zweig makes the point that the Nazis made their greatest headway with "the legion of the unprivileged, the despised, the injured." No wonder.
Zweig personally was a child of privilege and his lost Eden was the social order of turn of the century Austria, although he resented the strictures of social mores, especially as regards sex. So while he acknowledged the motivations behind those he used to represent evil, as expressed in Chess he had no really sympathy or liking for them. A more nuanced view of both sides would have been better, but I don't think the "hook" of the chess game would have stood it, so there's the impasse for me.
That said, he made the chess game itself a nail-biter. Technically, I think we have a record, in that there were three discrete narrators. The friend who filled in "Zweig" on Czentovich's backstory suffered from the flaw shared by Noel Strachan and Dr. Watson (for those who are also reading in the other club), in that he imparted details he couldn't possibly have known.
If anyone's reading the New York Review Books edition, I'd be interested to get a sense of what Peter Gay said about the work. I read what I think must have been the original English translation by B. W. Huebsch and I don't think the work suffers for it. If anything, it has an old-timey feel that I think fits the style and story, rooted in a world that was dead.
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