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Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw
Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw
Dec 5, 2025 5:23 AM

Author:Thomas Glavinic

Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw

In Vienna, in the winter of 1910, the world of chess is aghast and the city abuzz. The unthinkable has happened: in the fifth round of the World Championship the renowned defending champion, Emanuel Lasker, has made an elementary error and lost a match. The little-known Austrian challenger, Carl Haffner, stands in the limelight, the title within his grasp.

Haffner is a shy and fragile man, brought up in extreme poverty, from which his only escape is his exceptional gift for chess. His is a game shaped by the harsh experiences he has undergone. He has an obsessive fear of defeat, and his tactics and overall strategy are based on the sheer artistry of defence. But this confrontation with Lasker is not merely a clash between rook and knight; it is a collision between two men with vastly differing attitudes to life: the wealthy, worldly, self-confident champion on the one hand, the lonely, idealistic and penniless Haffner on the other.

Carl Haffner is modelled on the Austrian grandmaster Karl Schlechter, and in his brilliant first novel Thomas Glavinic brings to life both the events surrounding the ten-match world championship and the atmosphere of the cafés and chess clubs of Vienna and Berlin in the years before the First World War. With mature insight, he analyses the reasons for Haffner's view of the world, a world that is thrown into further confusion by the appearance of the fascinating and beautiful Anna.

Reviews

Margaret Kennedy caught just the taste of the time, mixing a stolid domestic Englishness with 'Continental' bohemians

—— Irish Times

She is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed

—— Anita Brookner

Kennedy was immensely popular in her heyday

—— Washington Post

Keeps you reading by dragging you from one hammer blow to the next.

—— ImagineFX

This is the real meat. The last zombie novel you'll ever need.

—— Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine and Twisted Little Vein

Peter Stenson has done the near impossible in delivering a savage fire-storm of a page-turner while also enabling a hard and earnest look at addiction and love. I tore through Fiend with the crazed fervor of an addict, but like all great stories these characters lingered in my thoughts long after I turned the last beautiful and brutal page.

—— Alan Heathcock, author of Volt

With a pared down snappy writing style, Fiend opens an exciting new chapter for modern horror.

—— Big Issue in the North

Not a sentence or a thought out of place. It takes over as his finest fiction to date

—— Irish Times

Remarkable freshness and immediacy ... with a lovely comedic lightness

—— Daily Mail

A lovely, thoughtful book ... alive with authentic detail, moved along by the ripples of affection and doubt that shape any life: a novel that offers the reader serious pleasure

—— Daily Telegraph

Tremendously moving and powerful

—— New Statesman

There is such elegant subtlety to this story

—— Irish Independent

The Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano claims to have written a version of the same novel throughout his career; in a sense so has Petterson, but his anguished precision is such that no one should complain

—— Telegraph

Illuminated by a clear and insightful knowledge of what it means to be human... Petterson is really a masterful depictor of contemporary life

—— Nordjyske, Denmark

I Refuse is, despite its apparent realism, a nearly magical literary experience... It simply does not get much better than this

—— Ekstra Bladet, Denmark

Petterson confirms his reputation as Scandinavia's leading realist writer...the heart-rending contrast between power and powerlessness, silence and speech is anchored in every word in these pages. And in the reader’s soul

—— Kristeligt Dagblad, Denmark

A masterpiece...at least as good as Out Stealing Horses... Intimate, shocking, demanding, raw

—— Morgenbladet, Norway

Norwegian literature's clearest shining star...a masterful novel about friendship, violence and destruction

—— Information, Denmark

A moving, complex short novel that is richer and more satisfying than most books several times its length

—— Daragh Reddin , Metro Herald

The suspense isn’t in the plot but the prose, with its extraordinary looping sentences

—— Blake Morrison , Guardian Weekly

A harrowing account of childhood, of friendship, and of family disruption… Precise, scrupulous and emotionally intense… Peterson is a skilled storyteller… An admirable and honest novel.

—— Eibhear Walshe , Irish Examiner

With an enchanting, poetic language Rachel Joyce writes about the fundamental questions of life and death.

—— 52buecher, Germany

Like Harold Fry, Queenie is delightful and dark. Death, duty and regret shadow nearly every page, but the darkness is not unrelenting; there is humor, and there is light.

—— Minneapolis Star Tribune

This lovely book is full of joy. Much more than the story of a woman’s enduring love for an ordinary, flawed man, it’s an ode to messy, imperfect, glorious, unsung humanity ... Her love song is for us. Thank you, Rachel Joyce.

—— Washington Post

[A] deeply affecting novel…Culminating in a shattering revelation, her tale is funny, sad, hopeful: She’s bound for death, but full of life.

—— People Magazine

A moving, lyrical read about life, love and saying goodbye. this is a companion story to the similarly entrancing The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, but could be read alone.

—— Cathy Rentzenbrink , Prima
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