Bobby Fischer's Endgame
: Created:28 Jan 2011 , by
Frank Brady latest book about Fischer attracted a review in last Sunday’s New York Times.
Brady’s book is titled "Endgame" and has a fifteen word sub-title to which his editor should have taken a large pair of scissors. Janet Maslin in her review praises Brady’s source material including Fischer’s own unpublished manuscript of his conversations with associates, mentors and relatives. She adds, "Note the omission of the word "friends." Fischer never had them." In Brady’s opinion Fischer’s personality changed for the worse at the age of sixteen. "Gone was Charming Bobby with the electric smile," he writes. "Enter Problematic Bobby with the disdainful attitude and frequently flashed warning scowl. Increasingly, Bobby viewed it as a favor merely to be seen with him." Fischer was born in 1943, the same year as I and the unfolding of his life has been an eternal fascination to me. He takes over the from Paul Morphy, the mantle of the strangest world champion in history. He was not asexual but his devotion to chess outstripped his desire for women as a story from the book about his visit to a brothel in Curacao illustrates. I quote the end of Janet Maslin’s article which presumably gives a flavour of the book: "The most interesting parts of this mesmerizingly odd book come late, as when Fischer attended a screening of the American film "Pearl Harbor" in Japan and clapped so loudly that Japanese members of the audience were embarrassed. Mr. Brady follows the trail to Iceland, where Fischer settled quietly in Reykjavik and disappeared from public view. (By this time, "something in his aura reminded an observer of an ill-treated dog just escaped from his captors.") The book locates his haunts and describes his habits, always understanding the strange logic that shaped Fischer’s choices. A favorite cagey trick: he loved both the privacy and provocation of entering a store a minute before closing time and forcing its weary staff to do his bidding. "Like the number of squares on a chessboard — an irony that nevertheless cannot be pressed too far — he was 64," Mr. Brady writes of Fischer’s death in 2008. Then this already-strange tale follows Fischer beyond the grave. How did he leave a legacy so ugly that his body could be exhumed for a DNA paternity test in 2010? Mr. Brady doesn’t have a simple answer. But he uses "the whole catastrophe," a phrase from "Zorba the Greek," to describe what Bobby Fischer had become. And his fascinating "Endgame" offers a whole book’s worth of clues."