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The Game for Real
Compared to Kafka and a member of the Surrealists, Richard Weiner is one of European literature’s best-kept secrets. The Game for Real marks the long overdue arrival of his dreamlike, anxiety-ridden fiction into English.
The book opens with The Game of Quartering, where an unnamed hero discovers his double. Surely, he reasons, if he has a double, then his double must also have a double too, and so on . . . What follows is a grotesquely hilarious, snowballing spree through Paris, where real-life landmarks disintegrate into theaters, puppet shows, and, ultimately, a funeral.
Following this, The Game for the Honor of Payback neatly inverts things: instead of a branching, expanding adventure, a man known as “Shame” embarks on a quest that collapses inward. Slapped by someone he despises, he launches a doomed crusade to return the insult. As the stakes grow ever higher, it seems that Shame will stop at nothing — even if he discovers he’s chasing his own tail.
Blending metaphysical questions with farcical humor, bizarre twists, and acute psychology, The Game for Real is a riveting exploration of who we are — and why we can’t be so sure we know.
The book opens with The Game of Quartering, where an unnamed hero discovers his double. Surely, he reasons, if he has a double, then his double must also have a double too, and so on . . . What follows is a grotesquely hilarious, snowballing spree through Paris, where real-life landmarks disintegrate into theaters, puppet shows, and, ultimately, a funeral.
Following this, The Game for the Honor of Payback neatly inverts things: instead of a branching, expanding adventure, a man known as “Shame” embarks on a quest that collapses inward. Slapped by someone he despises, he launches a doomed crusade to return the insult. As the stakes grow ever higher, it seems that Shame will stop at nothing — even if he discovers he’s chasing his own tail.
Blending metaphysical questions with farcical humor, bizarre twists, and acute psychology, The Game for Real is a riveting exploration of who we are — and why we can’t be so sure we know.
- GenresCzech LiteratureFiction
286 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1933
3 people are currently reading
143 people want to read
About the author
Richard Weiner
27 books4 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See Similar Names for more information.
Richard Weiner was a Czech journalist and writer. He is generally considered to be one of the most important Czech writers of the twentieth century, since he influenced many of his own and later generations of writers. Yet he is little known outside the Czech Republic. Because of his enigmatic writings he has often been likened to Franz Kafka, although mutual influences can be ruled out with near certainty. He has been called "the poet of anxiety", others spoke of him as "the Odd-man out" of Czech literature. His contemporary Karel Čapek named him "the man of pain." -- Wikipedia
Richard Weiner was a Czech journalist and writer. He is generally considered to be one of the most important Czech writers of the twentieth century, since he influenced many of his own and later generations of writers. Yet he is little known outside the Czech Republic. Because of his enigmatic writings he has often been likened to Franz Kafka, although mutual influences can be ruled out with near certainty. He has been called "the poet of anxiety", others spoke of him as "the Odd-man out" of Czech literature. His contemporary Karel Čapek named him "the man of pain." -- Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 26, 2020
"What books are on your nightstand?" asks the Times. On my nightstand are all the books I've started but can't finish, but which I don't have the heart to get rid of. That includes this one, which is really a pair of novellas, of which "The Game of Quartering" is first. I bought it from its publisher's booth at the Berkeley Book Festival, an event that I rate one star; this book being my only purchase. "The Game of Quartering" is not easy to describe. For one thing, the synopsis provided on the jacket doesn't match the actual story. Or at least I don't think it does. The synopsis (which was echoed to me by the publisher's representative): "an unnamed hero discovers that he has a double. And surely, if he has a double, then his double must have a double, and so on... What follows is a grotesquely hilarious,
snowballing spree through Paris." What I believe happens: An unnamed hero is followed home by a man who resembles the (actual) flamenco dancer Vicente Escodero. They are met at the hero's door by a woman. The woman and the man occupy one room of the hero's apartment. Things proceed along surreal lines, some action sensible, some not. What's really strange are the interpretations of the action by the hero. "Pulling her hair, I heard and felt a weak snap. She smiled. She put her hands under her chin and raised it slightly. It was an obliging gesture that reminded me, I don't know why, of the gesture of a shopkeeper explaining how to work a toy you've purchased." After a few dozen pages of this, there's a change of scene, and the hero observes a sort of staged interaction between three characters (of whom the first two appear to be the man and the woman): Fuld, Giggles, and Mutig. Perhaps Giggles is shamed for having been in love with Mutig, who meanwhile has seduced Fuld; I don't know. There's eventually a sort of chase scene, and perhaps death(s), and perhaps a return to the story's beginning. The hero cycles through feelings of fear, boredom, and confusion.
There are rhythmic, repeated gestures:
"He would pace; he would stop; then he stepped toward us, smiled shyly, and shrugged his shoulders ('How silly of me to be frightened by such a thing!'). He shifted boyishly to the side, turned on his heel, started pacing again."
"Her empty gesture of tugging at her skirt was repeated so frequently, steadily, and so stereotypically that it eventually took on the character of a sort of secret means of communication."
Perhaps it's all an interpretation of a dance by Vicente Escodero, who was a participant in the French Avant-Garde scene of the 30's, while Weiner was an associate of the French surrealists. Or perhaps it's an attack on the Czech language, or upon the notion of identity, as suggested by other reviewers.
The opening pages are available online at Two Lines Press, the publisher's, site. I highly recommend reading at least this much. However, after 40-50 pages, I became stuck, and it was all I could do to force myself to finish the novella. I've been unable to get more than a few pages into the second novella: back onto my nightstand it goes!
snowballing spree through Paris." What I believe happens: An unnamed hero is followed home by a man who resembles the (actual) flamenco dancer Vicente Escodero. They are met at the hero's door by a woman. The woman and the man occupy one room of the hero's apartment. Things proceed along surreal lines, some action sensible, some not. What's really strange are the interpretations of the action by the hero. "Pulling her hair, I heard and felt a weak snap. She smiled. She put her hands under her chin and raised it slightly. It was an obliging gesture that reminded me, I don't know why, of the gesture of a shopkeeper explaining how to work a toy you've purchased." After a few dozen pages of this, there's a change of scene, and the hero observes a sort of staged interaction between three characters (of whom the first two appear to be the man and the woman): Fuld, Giggles, and Mutig. Perhaps Giggles is shamed for having been in love with Mutig, who meanwhile has seduced Fuld; I don't know. There's eventually a sort of chase scene, and perhaps death(s), and perhaps a return to the story's beginning. The hero cycles through feelings of fear, boredom, and confusion.
There are rhythmic, repeated gestures:
"He would pace; he would stop; then he stepped toward us, smiled shyly, and shrugged his shoulders ('How silly of me to be frightened by such a thing!'). He shifted boyishly to the side, turned on his heel, started pacing again."
"Her empty gesture of tugging at her skirt was repeated so frequently, steadily, and so stereotypically that it eventually took on the character of a sort of secret means of communication."
Perhaps it's all an interpretation of a dance by Vicente Escodero, who was a participant in the French Avant-Garde scene of the 30's, while Weiner was an associate of the French surrealists. Or perhaps it's an attack on the Czech language, or upon the notion of identity, as suggested by other reviewers.
The opening pages are available online at Two Lines Press, the publisher's, site. I highly recommend reading at least this much. However, after 40-50 pages, I became stuck, and it was all I could do to force myself to finish the novella. I've been unable to get more than a few pages into the second novella: back onto my nightstand it goes!
Read
September 4, 2020Chochol páně Steelových ctností scípal hanbou, že na policejních komisařstvích není nikoho, kdo by šílencům ucpal držku.
December 30, 2015
Read it in two halves as the book allows (and maybe shouldn't have but...). A masterpiece of modernism, beautiful, terrifying, hilarious, what-the-fuck-is-going-on?ness...
January 7, 2017
Unreadable.
December 10, 2016
This was a bizarre book. Although I clicked on "I'm finished" that doesn't mean I finished it. It means I'm finished pushing myself to read it. It fact I read the whole first part, and a bit of the second.
The book does not have a plot that makes any sense--it feels more like a dream where things happen one after another with no plausible connections. The sense that it is a dream comes to the surface around pp. 82-84 where the narrator talks about dreams, and even proposes a quasi-philosophical way of telling whether it is a dream (though that way doesn't really make sense, b/c it is dreamed as well). This makes it difficult to sustain any sense of what is going on, and hence to sustain a desire to keep reading. The dreamlike quality is a bit like a Bob Dylan drug-propelled song from the mid-60's. But what is clever and perhaps amusing for a 5-minute song with an actual tune becomes very difficult to appreciate when it goes on for hour after hour (and with no tune to sustain it).
The book is full, especially at the beginning, of multiple extended comparisons that are meant to be descriptive of the activity--"as if," "as though," "like" are words/phrases that appear over and over. I suppose we do find ourselves speaking like that when trying to describe something strange like a dream. But these comparisons were often genuinely odd--they challenged your imagination to figure out how X could be like Y in any interesting sense. For example (p. 66): "All of this had an air of carefully contrived ceremony, yet above it there dwelled an accent of tragic improvisation, so much so that there was a chill." It's not that that couldn't mean anything, but it takes an effort to figure out a meaning for it, and even then it's not clear how this is at all helpful in understanding anything. Furthermore, the author goes on to employ so many of these that it's not possible to keep expending the effort for a benefit that is hardly there. Homer employs such extended comparisons to good effect in the Iliad. But this author vastly overdoes it with comparisons that are more perplexing than illuminating--and they just keep on coming.
So the whole thing is a huge effort that feels unrewarded. I suppose I respect the author for having come up with all this, but it was not an enjoyable read in any sense. The book felt like a cross between Kafka's "The Trial" and Joyce's "Ulysses."
A blurb of praise on the book came from Bohumil Hrabal, a Czech writer whom I like and respect, and whose lyrical prose carries a story regardless of the plot. But I could only find one passage in this book of lyrical prose (pp. 58-9): "One day we were sitting--Andrew, John, Paul, Peter, and I, you know we're like brothers, which is to say we're predestined for each other--a quintipartite singularity. We're sitting one day, it's getting dark; we blend, so that we've already lost the sense of physical distinctness; that's how it falls (sic--"feels"?) when the gloved hand of evening holds the reigns (sic--it must be "reins"), as it were, of five minds running together; we were quiet for a long time, and in the silence there slowly hatched the thing we'd all been thinking of….we caught each other's gazes; our gazes locked at a single point, and so precisely that it made a spark.--We were a circle, and its center was a spark. Was it perhaps our collective thought? If it was a collective thought, we belonged to it, not it to us." I liked that, but it stood out for its rarity.
I credit the translator for this labor of love.
The book does not have a plot that makes any sense--it feels more like a dream where things happen one after another with no plausible connections. The sense that it is a dream comes to the surface around pp. 82-84 where the narrator talks about dreams, and even proposes a quasi-philosophical way of telling whether it is a dream (though that way doesn't really make sense, b/c it is dreamed as well). This makes it difficult to sustain any sense of what is going on, and hence to sustain a desire to keep reading. The dreamlike quality is a bit like a Bob Dylan drug-propelled song from the mid-60's. But what is clever and perhaps amusing for a 5-minute song with an actual tune becomes very difficult to appreciate when it goes on for hour after hour (and with no tune to sustain it).
The book is full, especially at the beginning, of multiple extended comparisons that are meant to be descriptive of the activity--"as if," "as though," "like" are words/phrases that appear over and over. I suppose we do find ourselves speaking like that when trying to describe something strange like a dream. But these comparisons were often genuinely odd--they challenged your imagination to figure out how X could be like Y in any interesting sense. For example (p. 66): "All of this had an air of carefully contrived ceremony, yet above it there dwelled an accent of tragic improvisation, so much so that there was a chill." It's not that that couldn't mean anything, but it takes an effort to figure out a meaning for it, and even then it's not clear how this is at all helpful in understanding anything. Furthermore, the author goes on to employ so many of these that it's not possible to keep expending the effort for a benefit that is hardly there. Homer employs such extended comparisons to good effect in the Iliad. But this author vastly overdoes it with comparisons that are more perplexing than illuminating--and they just keep on coming.
So the whole thing is a huge effort that feels unrewarded. I suppose I respect the author for having come up with all this, but it was not an enjoyable read in any sense. The book felt like a cross between Kafka's "The Trial" and Joyce's "Ulysses."
A blurb of praise on the book came from Bohumil Hrabal, a Czech writer whom I like and respect, and whose lyrical prose carries a story regardless of the plot. But I could only find one passage in this book of lyrical prose (pp. 58-9): "One day we were sitting--Andrew, John, Paul, Peter, and I, you know we're like brothers, which is to say we're predestined for each other--a quintipartite singularity. We're sitting one day, it's getting dark; we blend, so that we've already lost the sense of physical distinctness; that's how it falls (sic--"feels"?) when the gloved hand of evening holds the reigns (sic--it must be "reins"), as it were, of five minds running together; we were quiet for a long time, and in the silence there slowly hatched the thing we'd all been thinking of….we caught each other's gazes; our gazes locked at a single point, and so precisely that it made a spark.--We were a circle, and its center was a spark. Was it perhaps our collective thought? If it was a collective thought, we belonged to it, not it to us." I liked that, but it stood out for its rarity.
I credit the translator for this labor of love.
Read
March 10, 2016"There may not be a whole lot of action in The Game for Real, but the absurd is front and center. That absurdity is often a statement on the human condition, which no doubt is at play here. Doubles and doppelgängers may act as foils of our true selves that we suppress, or perhaps our bachelor fellow is undergoing a slow meltdown—a splintering in identity? It can take effort to read through the long blocks of angst and psychedelia in Weiner’s novel, but it’s well worth the effort." - Virginia Parobek
This book was reviewed in the January 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
This book was reviewed in the January 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
December 30, 2015
To be fair, I did not finish this. The metaphysical/absurdist feel was not working for me. Why not 1 star? Because I acknowledge the skill (from the 50+ pages I read), I just didn't enjoy it. I'll probably only finish if this makes the TOB shortlist.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews