The Pawn on the Chessboard

Book excerpt: Ir�ne N�mirovskyLe Pion sur l'�chiquierSet in France during the economic crisis of the nineteen-thirties, Le Pion sur l'�chiquier is an unflinching portrait of a man for whom life has lost all meaning. Son of a dying steel magnate whose investments crashed, Christophe Bohun works in an International News Agency and lives together with his dying father, wife, mistress and son, in dilapidated grandeur. At a time of external hardship, he appears to have everything and value nothing. Where his father was driven by a ruthless passion for high finance and his teenage son is eaten up with suppressed anger, N�mirovsky presents us with an anti-hero whose bleak interior life is an object lesson in alienation and emotional numbness.