Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Do you play chess? I do, and I used to play it every day during recess in secondary school with a friend who was as keen on it as I was. As I knew from that young age, chess is a sport. It requires intense focus, discipline, and the will to beat your opponent. It is also an art, as I also knew, because it demands creativity, subtlety, and a love of beauty. The sacrifice of a rook to launch a mating sequence. The stark precision of an endgame with just the kings and four pawns. When I stood before the early Russian novels by Vladimir Nabokov in Eslite Bookstore in Kuala Lumpur, where I paid a short visit in August, it was an easy decision to pick up  The Luzhin Defense . I knew the Russian writer loved chess almost as much as butterflies. I wanted to know how he would deal with the game in a work of fiction. From his third novel written in Russian, translated by Michael Scammell, I learned that chess is...

 I read Nabokov's third Russian novel The Luzhin Defence while on vacation in Penang, after picking up the book in Kuala Lumpur. The novel is very enjoyable. There is a deep paradox in Nabokov's treatment of his chess-playing protagonist: it is at once warm and cold. The warmth comes from the Bildungsroman mode, the loving recreation of a Russian setting, the tender analysis of exile, the sympathetic understanding of artistic passion. The cold comes from the art of fiction itself, since the author knows that his fictional creation cannot escape whatever fate he is designing for him. The logic of chess underlines, in this novel, the logic of fiction. Appropriately, I started reading Sandi Tan's novel Lurkers when I returned from Malaysia to Singapore. Appropriately because Sandi grew up in Singapore. Her first novel The Black Isle is obviously based on Singapore. It is nothing like any Singaporean novels that I have read. She has lived in Los Angeles county for many years n...