The Luneburg Variation [First U.S. Edition, First Printing] Maurensig, Paolo

As new condition black boards with silver spine lettering contained in an as new condition photographic dust jacket. Translated by Jon Rothschild. "At the opening of this gripping book - "the best debut novel of the year," critics called it when it appeared in Italy in 1995 - a cadaver is discovered, the body of an impeccable businessman from Munich, in an elaborate garden where topiary shrubs delineate a hidden chessboard behind the hedges. The death seems to b a suicide, with no plausible motivation, but then, as the plot of this passionately colored, cooly controlled thriller unfolds, we begin to see that its apparently random moves are variations on an opening gambit, and it can end only in a checkmate that annihilates the possibility of a rematch. Gary Kasparov has defined chess as "the most violent sport in existence," and that is true in this extroardinary novel, too. For the mortal duel around which it is constructed is between two chess players who are opposed human types - a clever, persecuted Jew and a ruthless, persecuting German - and when they face each other over a chessboard, at first in big international tournaments and then in a Nazi death camp, the stakes are nothing less than life itself." - from the inner front jacket flap. "Lucid and tight from start to finish, with no break in the style .[Maurensig] follows in the tradition of Nabokov, Joseph Roth, and Stefan Zweig.Readers even more than critics are impassioned by the beat of an unpredictable drum: The Luneburg Variation, a first novel, has become the most significant book of the literary year. Their enthusiasm gives hope." - La Stampa. "The real proof of this first-time author's abilities is evident in how he uses the plot of a mystery story, so that it is only on the last page of the book that we discover the dead man's horrible secret .Thus does he introduce the theme of memory and its actualization with those who were responsible for the Holocaust." - L'Unita. "From Maurensig's point of view, chess is a way of life - life itself, in fact. His psychological thriller begins with a mysterious suicide which is discovered to be. rather, a kind of death sentence administered from afar .Maurensig is a master of that controlled, suggestively rticent language that we have encountered in the great Middle European classics, with Zweig, Durrenmatt, and others .This is a dark enchantment." - Corriere Della Sera.