ZUGZWANG

Zugzwang is a position in chess in which all possible moves make your situation worse. In this intricately plotted novel, Otto Spethmann, a psychoanalyst in 1914 St. Petersburg, plays a long-running chess game with a fellow Polish Jew, the famous violinist Kopelzon, who has lately asked him to treat a brilliant but shattered young chess master called Rozental. But what is Rozental to Kopelzon? In their chess game, in Spethmann's life, and especially in the confusing and murderous revolutionary politics of the last years of Czarist Russia, zugzwang is a constant terrifying possibility. Stephen Lang masterfully manages this huge multinational cast of characters and dauntingly layered plot. Even the author sometimes teeters on the line between complexity and believability, but Lang is unfailingly convincing and entertaining. B.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2008]