Hans Ree's My Chess: A Quick Review
Hans Ree, My Chess (Foreword by Jan Timman). Russell Enterprises, 2013. 240 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos
Hans Ree is a grandmaster, but this is not a chess book in the usual sense. The title, My Chess, is in its way doubly misleading: it isn't about his chess, in the sense of presenting any of his games - or anyone else's games, for that matter. That's the "Chess" part, and the "My" part doesn't fare much better if one takes this to be a summary of is chess career or even a traditional autobiography. This very enjoyable book comprises a series of essays, presented in alphabetical order from "A6648" (about an anonymous player on the Internet Chess Player who has played more than 580,000 games there - a staggering figure!) to "Berry Withuis" (a Dutch chess journalist and informal organizer), with a sort of afterword essay called "A Sunny Existence".
The essays are most diverse. Many are about great players in chess, both Dutch (e.g. Max Euwe, Jan Hein Donner and Jan Timman) and from the rest of the world (Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen and Bobby Fischer, for example, and there are joint entries for the earlier pairing of Mikhail Botvinnik and Vassily Smyslov and the later one of Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov). There are entries for tournaments (the Lost Boys events), places (Venice), figures from literature (Vladimir Nabokov), art (Marcel Duchamp - who was also a chess master) and music (John Cage). Not unexpectedly, especially for someone from Ree's era, there's an entry for alcohol, and in tribute to Nikolai Gogol and the Russian organ for intuition, Ree has an essay on The Nose.
You will learn nothing here about how to become a better chess player, but it's a wonderful book that opens up the human side of the game from all sorts of angles. For Dutch readers the book may be almost indispensable, but I would recommend to all chess players wherever they may be from.
One of the last essays in the book is called "Taxi", about a cab ride he took in Rotterdam on his way to a chess tournament. The driver was not a chess player, but had a romantic perception of the grandeur of chess tournaments and the lives of professional players. Ree corrected his misconceptions along the trip, and then realized to his dismay what he had done:
After this the cab driver lapsed into silence, and I realized what I had done with my cursed pedantry. Here was someone who knew nothing about chess, but had accidentally picked up some interest in it. He had thought that the cream of the Dutch chess world needed bodyguards to protect them against hordes of fanatical fans, and that rich chess fans would fight to get their hands on one of the exorbitantly priced entry tickets. And I had shattered is illusion and robbed chess of its magic by telling him the banal truth.
I don't think that if his cab driver picked up the book, he would reach the same level of enchantment he had before his encounter with Ree the passenger. If he reads My Chess and encounters Ree the writer, however, he will see that the world of chess is a treasure in its own right, worthy of entry not for its external rewards but for its internal riches.
Reader Comments (1)
Thx for the review! Is anything said about whether the book is (maybe partly) a collection of Ree's column in "New in Chess" as often done? Or is it so far unpublished material?
[DM: As far as I know the material is previously unpublished.]