My novel "Chess on the Island" was listed for the Alexander Piatigorsky Prize in Russia. There are 31 books on a longlist, including two Hungarian books, the other one is László Krasznahorkai's Satan Tango. Both were translated to Russian by Vyacheslav Sereda. For the full list - and a detailed description of the 31 books - click here. I copy the review by Ilona Kiss in English.
The book of Istvan Orosz “Chess on the Island”
at first glance has a very simple plot. This is an attempt to reconstruct the
legendary chess game between Lenin and Bogdanov, which took place on April 10,
1908 on the island of Capri, on the terrace of the villa of M. Gorky, in the
presence of guest observers. Between the moves of the pieces, the storyteller
(“either as an impetuous novelist, or as a bookworm digging in sources”) pauses
time, as if on a chess game clock, and collects, parses, retells a huge number
of stories, gossip , legends and tricks of the two main players and surrounding
people who are so self-confident intend to "direct the course of
history." The narrator also intends to “direct the course of history” in
his semi-fictitious narration, only in the reverse order. He is interested not
in what is visible on photo and text documents, but what is clearly missing. To
do this, he resorts to his favorite trick: anamorphosis and other visual tricks
to create illusions developed in the course of art history. Istvan Orosz is
familiar with them firsthand: he is the famous Hungarian graphic artist, poster
and book designer, theater artist, and last but not least, the author of many
anamorphosis objects. He was engaged in fiction only at the age of 55, “Chess
on the Island” is already his 9th book. More precisely, an object book, an
anamorphosis book. The text in this "indefinite genre" of the work
turns into different types of images, and the pictures fall into text-shaped
figures. The “spread”, as the smallest visual unit of the book, is composed of
text-shaped figures and verbal “drawings” (photographs, maps, illustrations in
combination with inscriptions, page footnotes with color additions, etc.). The
chronology is not respected in restoring the biographies of the players and the
series of events around them (the narration itself ends at the time of
Bogdanov’s death), but rather is determined by visual twists. In this constant
movement in time, continuously changing space and turning back and forth
between texts and images, the reader-spectator himself must find a suitable
point of view for himself in order to see at least some whole picture. A
certain imaginary object is wedged into the picture (or into the text turned
into a visual object), creating the illusion that with it we will see something
definite. In fact, this is just something desired, and it does not lend itself
to verbal expression. We enjoy a lot of juicy and terrible details (as in a
voluminous mirror labyrinth) - in the illusion that we come closer to the
essence of "history". And only at the end we begin to suspect that we
are under the effect of the so-called "Significant absence." From the
proposed “visual narration” there is no structural center in relation to which
we could realize the figurative text that was given to us precisely as
“history”. We ourselves must find our own criteria, our points of view for
orientation. By the way, the storyteller himself shares the same fate: he has
no more chance of seeing integrity than the “observers”. This is the
"philosophical" of this work. In the fact that in the book there is
no ready-made philosophy for understanding history, only a visual-verbal space
for reflection is given. The reader / viewer himself must find his suitable
position here, so that a series of strange images develop from this point of
view into an integral course of history, at least an integral reading of
history. - The anamorphosis book of Istvan Orosz in an excellent translation by
Vyacheslav Sereda is therefore worthy of attention also by the jury members of
the Piatigorsky Prize.
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