The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game

When you're recovering from any addiction, if you have a good sponsor, they will tell you to beware, because addiction-prone people often replace one addiction with another. As addictions go, chess is one of the more obscure, but that doesn't mean that it's harmless. Chess, like alcohol, heroin, or internet porn, can take over lives and destroy people. Hallman has a sheer genius for finding and exploring obscure subcultures. In this, his first book, Hallman explores the underworld of the chess-addicted. (His second book, also excellent, explores American cults and the religious fringe.) Here, he finds a traveling companion and guide for his descent, Glenn Umstead, a man who wants to be a grandmaster, but who is a tragic figure because, as Hallman explains, he doesn't quite have the chops to do it. One of the most fascinating journeys in the book is the trip to Kalmykia, an impoverished Russian province, whose president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is diverting resources to pay for his dream of building "Chess City," which sounds like the Mad Wizard is building a chess version of the Emerald City of Oz. Upon meeting the president, however, Hallman decides that Ilyumzhinov is less like the Wizard or Kurtz (from *Heart of Darkness*) than Goldfinger, "a not entirely unsympathetic supervillian with a kooky plan to dominate the chess world." This book asks the question, "Why chess?" as a way to ask the larger question, "Why obsession?" Though Hallman never states an answer (because there is no answer except perhaps through neurobiology) his descent into the maelstrom shows us that the journey is indeed the answer itself. TK Kenyon Author, Rabid

"Not in any sport or game I have watched or played have I felt anything to quite match the visceral shock of a live chess game that descends into the hostile ballet of two players in time trouble. No extra inning, no hurry-up offense, no photo finish, no river card showdown quite imitates the intoxication of watching two players in an exchange that measures the extent of their wits and the intelligence of their fingers." Like in this passage, writer Hallman approaches chess as a casual observer, acquainting himself with its history and making friends with Glenn, the quirky chess artist who is his guide. This book is about their friendship--a friendship that is like a chess game itself, sometimes tense, sometimes aggressive, and arriving eventually at a snapshot of a world I'd never seen before, but would like to now. I recommend this book highly.

At first I did not know for certain how much a non chess player could get of this book; after all the very first condition to meet for a pleasant and/or useful reading is simpathy or familiarity -or neccesity- with the kind of environments and characters and events and issues that appears in it. Nevertheless, Hallman capabilities as a writer thouroughly wiped my doubts. His description of places, atmospheres, men and women, tournaments or of boring or weird nights in Kalmikya, as he did with any piece of info or trivia related with the universe of chess, are often masterpieces. He has the gift to offer great metaphores to describe poignantly a person, a room, an event. You can see, you even can smell a dilapidated GM fighting with his nerves over a board for a paltry price in a forgetable tournament and you can feel the emotions, ambitions and despairs of so many chess players lurking in the dark alleys of this cursed and fantasctic game. In the end, a great show of how much -and how deep- the piercing eye of a good writer can get and how far he can go. Hallman see the esentials and is capable of saying it in one or two lines. His reflections of the nature of chess, his history, his meaning are also entertanning and shed full light on this glorius game. Great reading.

Glenn Umstead is a local chess hero, "local" being Atlantic city. He has a rating that puts him in the top 1% of all tournament players in the USA but he's not even a blip on the radar screen of international grandmaster chess. He supplements his catch-as-catch can existence by hustling lesser players ("patzers" or "fish" in the arcane vernacular of the chess world), giving simultaneous exhibitions and playing blindfold chess. Neat parlor tricks but nothing more. Mr. Umstead seems like a very nice man-he gives food and money to fellow chessplayers who are down on their luck-but he is, outside of chess, basically unread and socially inept. For example, in the book's centerpiece trip to Kalmykia, he asks the guide showing him and the author the monument to the 100,000 victims of Stalin's ethnic purges how much money it's worth. Things like that.J.C. Hallman was astute enough to see the artistic potential in shepherding a quirky chess master through various chess venues-both traditional and underground-and chronicling his adventures. He accompanies Mr. Umstead on forays into New York's chess hustling scene (fittingly, they rode to New York on a Greyhound bus, a la "Midnight Cowboy"), a prison, the Princeton math department lounge, the internet, the World Open, and to the afore-mentioned Kalmykia, one of the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union that is so strange a country it could have been dreamed up by Kurt Vonnegut. The president of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is also president of the world international chess governing body, FIDE. A chess master, Ilyumzhinov has devoted enormous amounts of his country's scant resources to make Kalmykia the chess center of the world. It is not going well. The president is also a supect in the murder of a journalist who may have been close to unearthing corruption. The juxtaposition of this literal bloodshed with the symbolic bloodletting on the chessboard proves irresistable to Mr. Hallman. Utilizing who knows what credentials he manages to travel to Kalmykia with Mr. Umstead and actually have an audience with President Ilyumzhinov. He also arranges for Mr. Umstead to play a series of games with the only Kalmykian grandmaster-in-training, a grade-school boy; the boy gets the better of it. Mr. Hallman doesn't find out anything more about the murder than is already known but he does snoop around enough to draw the attention of government security people.Mr. Hallman himself never aspired to be a serious chess player, but chess, with its "...watered-down machismo and bent personalities" clearly has a hold on him. He writes knowingly and beautifully of the game's history and development and gives the obligatory snapshot of the bentest of the bent, Bobby Fischer. But this is not a book about the superstars of the game. It is a tour through the chess underworld, with Glenn Umstead playing Vergil to to J.C. Hallman's Dante. "The Chess Artist" is a well-told tale from a young writer with a bright future.

I picked this book up by mistake and was hooked from the very beginning. It is more of a travel book rather than a "how to" book on chess. The characters had depth and the colorful characters were compelling. Can't wait to see what else this guy comes up with!