Daily Rome Shot 1049

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m trying to raise some money to cover my fee and travel to a conference for priests held by the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

Thanks to: WH, LD, MM, and today, BMR, JK, DC, AR.  Moreover, DM and JMcG, and KM.

Please remember me when shopping online and use my affiliate links.  US HERE – UK HERE  WHY?  This helps to pay for health insurance (massively hiked for this new year of surprises), utilities, groceries, etc..  At no extra cost, you provide help for which I am grateful.

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Today I read about an annual open tournament on a Greek island, the ‘Ikaros’ tournament, every July. It seems relaxed and is intended also to be a kind of chess vacation. Sounds fun. Maybe next year.

I’m nearly done with the ominously entitled novel…

The Death’s Head Chess Club by John Donoghue.

US HERE – UK HERE

The premise:  An SS officer, wounded on the Eastern front, is transferred to Auschwitz to work on morale and efficiency.  He starts a chess club for the officers at a nearby luxury resort.  Meanwhile, a French Jew who is a prisoner, a watchmaker by trade, is in the camp.  A guard recruits him to play chess.  You can see where this is going.  Anyway, decades later they are pitted against each other in a tournament.  However, by now the former SS officer is now a Catholic bishop.  This is what really caught my eye and prompted me to start.   Each chapter is named after a term or opening.

It could be interesting were others to read this now and we could have some comments.

Just as I don’t post solutions to the puzzles right away, I won’t post plot updates on this book.

And speaking of spoilers…

NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.

Thank you, Lord, for this day.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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4 Comments

  1. almostpogo says:

    I urge readers of The Death’s Head Chess Club to thoughtfully consider the names of the main characters.  As Mr. O’Brien did in Father Elijah, I believe that Mr. Donoghue chose the names very carefully and intentionally.

  2. GHP says:

    The reviews on Amazon, plus Fr. Z’s abstract, enticed me to purchase the book.

    Of course I used Fr. Z’s Amazon link for the purchase — I use his link for every Amazon purchase I make.

    — Guy

  3. tzabiega says:

    It is a little strange to promote a book that repeats a typical stereotype promoted by anti-Catholic media that the victims of the Nazis were almost all Jews and many if not most of the perpetrators were Catholic and that the Catholic Church aided the Nazis. This is even though the author of the Final Solution and head of the SD, the most notorious part of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, noted in many of his correspondence that Catholics would be taken care of just like the Jews when the war was won by Germany, but until then the Nazis needed them for canon fodder in the German armed forces. To make a SS-man become a Catholic bishop makes this book more of science fiction like Star Wars than a serious historical novel. God’s mercy extends to everyone, and it did even to the commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, who sincerely returned to the Church and apologized for his crimes (including the murder of countless priests) before being executed, but an SS bishop is about as appropriate a theme as a pedophile bishop (even one who had repented of the pedophilia): it is simply not a book to advertise because the author is at least historically naive, or maybe a useful tool in promoting false anti-Catholic propaganda.

  4. Gianni says:

    If you are looking for a book about chess, you will be disappointed. If you are interested in good and evil, how evil can gain as ascendancy in a culture, and the concept of forgiveness, this is the book for you. Emil, the Jew, kept alive by his ability to repair watches, Meissner, the former Waffen SS officer, now a bishop who spent years in Africa, dying of leukemia, Schweninger, the (at first) smug and self-righteous former member of the Ministry of Propaganda, create an intellectual dance as they grope toward understanding and forgiveness

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