Kirkus Review
This first novel ambitiously and awkwardly examines questions of guilt and forgiveness arising from the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. At a 1962 chess tournament in Amsterdam, Holocaust survivor Emil Clment is disturbed that his first opponent is the German Wilhelm Schweninger, a Nazi propagandist. His emotions and memories are jolted further when he is sought out in the Dutch city by Paul Meissner, an officer at Auschwitz who helped Clment and, after jail time for war crimes, became a priest. Chapters alternate between the strange bonds formed amid the horrors of imprisonment and the slowly growing friendship among the three men in 1962. To boost officers' morale at Auschwitz, Meissner starts a chess club, but when he learns that the Jewish prisoner Clment is considered unbeatable, he arranges to have him face the camp's best German players. After Clment defeats three, he is hounded by a Gestapo sadist who is also a top chess player. Schweninger has a minor role in the flashbacks: Germany's best player in the 1940s, he was to have been the prisoner's last opponent but was prevented from playing the game. In the 1962 chapters, Meissner is a Catholic bishop dying of leukemia who wants Clment to find forgiveness and to abandon his belief that there are no good Germans. The novel's dubious setup, with Meissner so quickly corralling Clment and Schweninger, is offset by a fairly persuasive rendering of the camp, where the author uses the chess games to maintain an element of suspense in a situation in which death was almost inevitableand clearly was postponed for Clment. Donoghue, a Briton, is readable and well-intentioned, but plausibility frays in the number of bad guys converted to goodness and, unfortunately, in the notion that the bitterness Clment has harbored for almost two decades can be eased in several days of recollection and dying-man homilies. That's quite a talking cure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Donoghue's first novel centers on two men struggling with the legacy of Auschwitz. French Jew Emil Clément, a prisoner in one of the Auschwitz labor camps, is a formidable chess player, and this brings him to the attention of SS-Obersturmführer Paul Meissner. Meissner has organized a camp chess club in an effort to boost morale and decides to test the skills of the SS against those of a supposedly unbeatable Jew. Chess enables Emil to survive, but he has nothing left after the war except chess and hate. In Amsterdam for the 1962 World Chess Federation Tournament, he is disturbed to learn that his opponent is an ex-Nazi and even more disturbed when he encounters Meissner, now a Catholic bishop who is terminally ill and wants to find some peace before he dies. Building his story by switching back and forth between the 1940s and 1960s and providing an impressive amount of detail (complete with appendix, footnotes, and glossary) about both chess and the workings of Auschwitz, Donoghue offers a compelling tale of expiation and forgiveness.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2015 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In 1944, Emil is a prisoner in Auschwitz. Paul is an officer there: his job isn't to kill Jews but to push them to higher productivity. When Himmler wants to publicize the cultured side of camp life, Paul proposes chess matches. Eventually, Emil, whose relationship with the game is mystical, sits across the table from his oppressors, winning against them again and again. Eighteen years later, Emil sits at another table playing against another German. Emil believes that there is no such thing as a good -German. The two players' loathing is apparent. Then Paul arrives. Now a Catholic bishop, he's dying of leukemia. He's tracked Emil down to beg his forgiveness--not for Paul, who doesn't believe he deserves it, after Auschwitz. But Emil needs to forgive himself in order to go on living. "God has a purpose for my life," says Paul. "That purpose is you." The former enemies somehow find a way to talk about their shared past. VERDICT The book's theme is noble but not sustained as effectively as it should be. The narrative mechanically switches from present to past and the prose is often wooden. Still, the issues the story raises should attract serious readers of historical fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
