Bertina Henrichs: La Joueuse d'échecs (2005)

Found in the amazingly active boîte à lire in Maisons-Laffitte last September, this delightful book with a not-too-enticing title: La Joueuse d'échecs (lit. 'The Female Chess Player'). This was turned into a film (La Joueuse) with Sandrine Bonnaire as Eleni and Kevin Kline as Kouros in 2009, but the novel doesn't seem to have been translated into English: some people as missing out on a treat.

My knowledge of chess is frozen in my schooldays, although I remember the rules. This short novel doesn't really dwell on too many niceties of the game, although it mentions a number of strategy names I was certainly unfamiliar with. For some reason, chess seems to be a mainly male preserve, allthough as the novel points out it's the queen that has the active role and the king the essentially passive one. And yes, it seems odd to call the bishop le fou (the madman) when he keeps to the conventional diagonal path all the time, while it's the knight – cavalier in French – who goes through a crazy two squares one way and one square another movement. Ah, the delights of the world of chess!

And it is those delights which are to obsess Eleni, the Greek femme de ménage at Hôtel Dionysos on the island of Naxos, where her usual preoccupations are dispensing with used condoms and clearing up bloodstains and urine. Until she literally bumps into a chessboard left open in a room by a couple of French tourists. A chess virgin, she wonders what arcane excitement such objects can hold for her, and this forty-two-year-old decides to buy a set for the upcoming birthday of husband Panis, the local skilled mechanic. Alas, Panis has no interest in such toys, although Eleni's interest continues, until she's secretly playing the game with her former teacher, the elderly Kouros, who originally sought out an electronic copy of the game for her.

Not only does she manage after a time to beat Kouros, but beats his friend the frosty Costa. This delights her, although she soon discovers that her delight can only be understood by those who enjoy such esoteric accomplishments. Meanwhile, the whole town knows about the outrage; her friend Katherina feels shunned, her son Yannis thinks it's pre-menopausal, but worst of all her husband is disgusted: it's almost worse than finding his wife has a lover in this macho community, and even divorcce is quietly (but not too seriously) mentioned. But Eleni will go on to success in the capital.

The novel had me trying several games on my laptop, although the computer won easily each time. I used to find pool easier: rather bigger dimensions, but at least the geometry is far less complicated. Oh, a great little book by the way!