Embracing a game of chess -- and life

CHESS has an austere aura, a tangible intellectual odor of wisdom, pipe smoke and deep, deep thought. Devotees are legion. To those who consider themselves hopelessly uninitiated, it is not a little frightening. But for those with just a little bit of courage and a pinch of bravado, “The Immortal Game” by David Shenk might be just the thing to get you in the thrall of this ancient game.

Shenk, who has written a book on Alzheimer’s (“The Forgetting”) and has written extensively on the information society we inhabit, has in this most recent effort constructed an introduction to chess that is clear, elegant, sophisticated and easy to understand.

To do all this he has taken a famous 19th century game in London to use as a vehicle. He has hung on it as on a Christmas tree the rules of chess and its history, how to play it, stories of some of its most famous masters.

The game he employs was played in less than an hour at the Grand Divan Tavern at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand on June 21, 1851. The players were German-born Adolf Anderssen, math professor, playing white; and Lionel Kieseritsky, a former math teacher from Estonia, who gave chess lessons in Paris. They were both taking time out from a 16-man chess championship tournament taking place a mile away

This game, so casually begun, quickly became a “once-in-a-lifetime event,” Shenk writes, a case of two players stumbling into “a game of true grace and beauty, danger and cunning, temptation, treachery and surprise after surprise after surprise.”

That game has reached legendary status, and is now known as the Immortal Game, a nickname that Shenk uses as a metaphor for the game as a whole. “That unexpectedness, that surprising brilliance and beauty, is precisely what makes the Immortal Game such a great game to dissect, move by move,” he writes.

Each move is illustrated by a diagram, and as you read, you feel no pressure of time. You can take as much time as you need to puzzle out each move. By the end of the book this reader, at least, felt refreshed with memories of knowledge long forgotten and intimations of new discoveries.

Whether the game of chess contains all the intellectual properties and mental stimulation claimed in the promotional cover line for “The Immortal Game” (“Or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain”) is, strictly speaking, beside the point. Something so intricate cannot, you think, be bad for the brain. But -- yes it can. Think only of the avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp, who put painting aside to play chess obsessively, or of the brilliant American maverick Bobby Fischer.

Shenk admirably explains the current trends toward using chess in schools as a teaching tool, where by all accounts it can be most effective, especially in stimulating young people averse to the ordinary classroom experience. His discussion of artificial intelligence and chess played by computer is lucid and instructive. Like many chess players, Shenk embraces the game with a combination of love and respect. He has a particular reason: Shenk writes movingly about finally getting to see the watch given to a famous Polish chess master, his great-great grandfather, Samuel Rosenthal, who immigrated to France in 1864. Family lore has the timepiece as jewel-encrusted and bestowed by a Napoleon. When Shenk pieces together the story and finally sees the watch, he writes, it “did not disappoint.”

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Anthony Day is a former editor of The Times’ editorial pages.