Summerbook #1: The Chess Set in the Mirror

By -

 The Chess Set in the Mirror, by Massimo Bontempelli

I've spent all week being sick and writing up the Germany trip, but now that I've got the posts written, they need photos. o.O  That will take a while.  So here's my first summer book!   I was so attracted by the title that I actually purchased the book, which was published in Italian in 1922.  It's a classic of Italian children's literature (or so they tell me), and Bontempelli himself was a prolific and famous Italian writer.  Apparently he also coined the term 'magical realism.'  Which this story isn't; it's just straight up fantasy.

Narrated in the first person, Bontempelli describes the time that he was ten years old and was locked in an empty room as a punishment.  He notices a chess set in front of a mirror, but he can't see himself reflected, and as he bobs around trying to get high enough to see himself, the reflected chess set seems to come alive.  He is invited into the mirror, and discovers another world -- the strange, blank world of the mirror, where the people who have been reflected in the glass live.  Everyone in this mirror-world is infected with a sense of his own importance; the chess kings know that they, and the chess games they play, are the only real and important things, while a dressmaker's dummy insists that he is the pattern by which all people measure themselves.  

It's a very strange world and quite unlike anything else I've read about in children's literature; surreal and perhaps a bit menacing.  The illustrations add to this atmosphere.  I don't mean that it's a scary story, but it's certainly not sweet or charming.  Just a little bit unsettling, I'd call it.  Our young narrator is, as ten-year-old boys are often apt to be, impatient and angry that he doesn't understand this strange new dimension.

I enjoyed this quite a bit.  Worth seeking out if it sounds interesting to you.



Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more