Paolo Maurensig
La variante di Lüneburg

Dieter Frisch is a distinguished sixty-eight-year-old gentleman who lacks nothing: a millionaire entrepreneur, owner of a villa with an attached park and hunting reserve, married to a wealthy heiress, and father of four children integrated into high society...

Why, then, on a Saturday like any other, does he take his own life? Why does he shoot himself in the mouth, with his legally owned gun, right at the center of the labyrinth of his villa? And what is the meaning of that rag opened on the table of his study, depicting a battered chessboard topped by crude pieces on which the chess pieces have been poorly drawn? Why that one, among dozens of exquisite chessboards that Dr. Frisch collects due to his passion for that game?

For his admirable debut, the Gorizian Paolo Maurensig (in his fifties at the time of the book's publication) chooses to start from the end. And to reconstruct backwards that story which represents one of the best debuts in Italian literature of the last decades.

The strength of the story lies in its construction. It's as if Maurensig adopted the scheme of an equation with three unknowns (x, y, z):

X is the already described Dr. Frisch, who every Friday makes the return journey by train from Munich, where his company is based, to Vienna, where he lives;

Y, in order of appearance, is an apparently insignificant boy, Hans, who unexpectedly settles in Dr. Frisch's compartment one Friday evening to make that return journey with him and, at the first opportunity, to tell the story of his passion for chess (which determined the various ups and downs of his young life);

Z is Tabori, the old connoisseur of the game of chess that emerges, with all his mysteries, from the story narrated by Hans (Y) to Dr. Frisch (X).

For almost two-thirds of the book, "The Lüneburg Variation" takes place in a train compartment, clearly outlining the relationship between X and Y (the former is the chess enthusiast who listens to the story the latter has to tell on the subject) and between Y and Z (the former is the boy captivated by that game who finds in the latter the grandmaster who will pass on its secrets and dangers, making him a great interpreter of it). Just a few kilometers from the train's arrival in Vienna, young Hans’s story ends with Dr. Frisch’s assertion — both peremptory and almost resigned — revealing that he finally understands he is the real protagonist of the story, even though the boy was very careful not to mention his name; the beauty is that the reader does not have the slightest grasp of the overall story, as the relationship between X and Z has remained completely in the shadows.

In the last third of the novel, another story begins, that of Tabori (the unknown Z), who from an omniscient ‘I’ becomes a narrating ‘I’, narrating himself as a child and how the game of chess, present in his destiny, damned his life.

Thus the equation is completed and clarified, and in the opposite term (the one after the equals sign =) the result appears definitively: "life" or "death", depending on how the reader chooses to interpret it.

A narrative structure like this is a true gem, to be studied by anyone aspiring to become a writer. And it is accompanied by a style that, although redundant in dwelling on certain moods, is certainly up to the result.

However, it is not a book to learn about chess: from this game — one of the most intelligent (and, in its way, cruel) invented by man — Maurensig has drawn the most "theatrical" aspects, to enhance the novel's pathos. It is evident, in any case, that Maurensig knows the game and perceives its charm... as happens to anyone (even when not a skilled player) who lets themselves be conquered by it.