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Synopsis
Star Pine Books celebrates the 20th anniversary of this most unusual, magical, and moving novel...
In the fall of 1901, in the town of Dayton, Ohio, a series of mysterious letters begins arriving at the garden home of Dr. and Mrs. Uyterhoeven. All are written by the doctor, who left only months before to serve in the relief camps set up for the Boer in South Africa, yet the letters make no mention of refugees or the war. Instead, they tell of a fantastic land the doctor has discovered, a floating island populated entirely by games pieces – chess, checkers, marbles, dice, and more -- all living, congregating, and feuding, and all embroiled in the final stages of a secret revolution that is both deeply troubling, but also strangely hopeful...
Dr. Uyterhoeven’s journey in that enchanted land, and the quiet ceremony with which his wife Sonja shares his tale with the neighborhood children, provide the main threads of this extraordinary work, weaving through a brilliant tapestry of dreams, histories, visions and meditations. What finally emerges, though, is the story of a man and a woman, born in the lowlands to two different worlds, joined by love, rent by loss, and reunited by the inspired life they would create together in their new American home.
“an improbable, brilliant tale...a Bidlungsroman, a novel of ideas, a love story and...a spiritual guide. Comparisons toNabokov and Calvino are doubtless in order...But THE CHESS GARDEN stands by itself, a marvel of attention to the things of this world, and worlds beyond.
- New York Times Book Review
”Like Garcia Marquez, Borges, even Poe, Hansen ...is a true inventor of fiction, and a protean, generous one at that.”
- Village Voice Literary Supplement
“Everything in the stories is new, unexpected, strange, and mysterious...With a richness of invention that makes the world of Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis seem impoverished.”
- The Boston Sunday Globe
“These tales form an allegory not only of the Doctor’s exemplary life but also of the wisdom he has gained in it – a quietude and a benevolence that in today’s world really do seem fabulous.”
- The New Yorker
“A masterpiece of surreal storytelling."
Library Journal
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About the Author
Brooks Hansen's novels – THE MONSTERS OF ST. HELENA, PERLMAN’S ORDEAL, THE CHESS GARDEN, and BOONE (co-authored with Nick Davis) were all New York Times Notable Books. THE CHESS GARDEN was also selected as a PW Best Book of the Year in 1995. He has written one book for Young Readers, CAESAR’S ANTLERS, which he also illustrated. In 2009 he released his first memoir, THE BROTHERHOOD OF JOSEPH, and in 2005 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for his most recent book, JOHN THE BAPTIZER, which was published in 2009 by W.W. Norton. More recently, his work has appeared in CENTRAL PARK: AN ANTHOLOGY (Bloomsbury USA,2012), and THE GOOD BOOK (Simon & Schuster, 2015).
From Publishers Weekly
A rare and exciting work of character and imagination, Hansen's new novel (after the highly praised Boone, which he coauthored with Nick Davis) is set in 19th-century Dayton, Ohio, in Europe and South Africa during the Boer War and on an imaginary island, the Antipodes. During his journey to the heart of the war, where he has volunteered to serve in a British-run concentration camp for forcibly displaced Boers, Dr. Gustav Uyterhoeven sends 12 letters to his wife, Sonja, in Dayton. The letters, fabulist explorations in the manner of Poe, Chesterton and Borges, describe a world where chess pieces, including a queen trapped in a tree, live, die, love, battle and philosophize. With a delightfully deft touch, Hansen carries this conceit off convincingly, and without a hint of sentimentality. Uyterhoeven is a remarkable character, dapper yet heartbroken, civilized, swinging his cane, journeying through sundry marvels with an air of concern and wonder that the reader comes to share. Meanwhile, back in Dayton, the reading of each new letter becomes an event; and, mysteriously, chess pieces mentioned in the letters begin to appear in the Uyterhoevens' garden. This is a complex and powerful work that achieves meaning in the most indelible way possible, through being an extraordinarily well-told tale. Black-and-white illustrations, not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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- PublisherFarrar, Straus & Giroux
- Publication date1995
- ISBN 10 0374998175
- ISBN 13 9780374998172
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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