On my shelf are dozens of novels that pertain to chess in some way. Only a few have real chess as their center, and fewer still qualify as belles lettres. Of the last, Nabokov’s "The Defense" long stood unchallenged, until Paolo Maurensig’s "The Luneberg Variation" a few years ago.

The Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic now bids to enter that select company, with a novel about the tragic Viennese star Karl Schlechter. Why he changed the name, one does not know, for all the facts about his character in this book parallel what is known about Schlechter, and the book even concludes by giving the moves of the fateful last game of the 1910 Lasker-Schlechter match. In it Schlechter missed a probable win, then eschewed a perpetual check that would have made him the third official world champion, only to lose. His heroic effort has been explained as predicated on the desire to be a worthy champion, not merely to profit from Lasker’s rare blunder in the one other decisive game. Glavinic, billed as a former prodigy, convinces us that his anti-hero’s nature determined his choice.

Most starving men will steal. At the end, this character cannot even accept charity, and starves to death at age 44, toward the end of the Great War. Thus a simple perpetual check could have saved the life of a genius. The atmospherics, family dysfunctions, and quasi-romances take the reader back to a historic chess match, but also to the last time in Europe when anyone could look forward to a bright 20th century. Well recommended -- if you can find it in America. This reader managed to get hold of the only copy in the L.A. Central Library.

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