Kasparov Revealed: A Review of Mortal Games

Christopher Chabris

Garry Kasparov may be the strongest chessplayer of all time, but he is certainly the most overexposed. The 13th world champion writes constantly about his life, his politics, and his games, appears on television wherever he goes, readily grants interviews, and meets his fans with an eager public face. He is no Arnold Schwarzenegger, but compared to Anatoly Karpov, who for years answered only pre-screened questions with the caution of a born bureaucrat, or Bobby Fischer, who limits his accessibility and offers insults or absurdities whenever he does meet the press, Kasparov is a traditional celebrity, a virtually open book in his professional life.

So what can we expect to learn from Fred Waitzkin's new book? Surprisingly, a lot. Mortal Games contains no chess moves, no diagrams, no annotations, no charts listing tournament or match results, not even any photographs (except the stylized cover image of Kasparov seemingly praying to the reader). Nevertheless it contains more insight into the man than any previous work in English, including Kasparov's several autobiographies.

In fact, Mortal Games (the title is apparently a word play on the "immortal game") is not a biography at all, but a portrait, or perhaps an extended profile, that could easily have appeared as a series of New Yorker articles rather than a book. A portrait is more appropriate than a biography for a 30-year-old subject whose career is still moving forward, far from ready to be summed up and dissected. The narrative is essentially structured as a look at Kasparov's peripatetic, globetrot-ting life during the period from early 1990 to mid-1991, with a few detours into the past, and an epilogue updating events through early 1993. (The first news of the "breakaway" from fide appears in a footnote.) Thus, the material does not overlap significantly with the periods covered in Kasparov's own popular accounts, Child of Change (published in 1987) and Unlimited Challenge (1990).

Like Waitzkin's previous all-prose book on chess, Searching for Bobby Fischer (now in print as a Penguin paperback), Mortal Games has an active narrator who participates in the events he is describing and continually ruminates on his own role and relationship to his subject. We learn of the difficulties and frustrations Waitzkin found in covering Kasparov, such as the champion's tendencies to arrive late to every meeting and to put off time-critical conversations for apparently arbitrary reasons.

Powerful Opening

The book opens just before the 1990 world championship match, at Kasparov's secluded training camp in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Waitzkin tells us that he helped to select the particular house Kasparov used, that soon after meeting Kasparov he became the champion's friend and confidant, and that Kasparov played a large role in shaping Waitzkin's view of chess and its world. These are appropriate admissions by the author that help readers to place his view of Kasparov in perspective.

Chapter 2, "Chess Training and Genocide," is easily the most powerful. Waitzkin temporarily suppresses his own presence and lets Kasparov take over for an extended quotation in which the champion describes what happened to himself and his extended family early in 1990. The news that reached the West was generally abbreviated to "Kasparov charters plane to save his family from ethnic fighting in Azerbaijan," but the champion's gripping, 12-page account makes us marvel that he was able to play chess at all for the rest of the year.

In Chapters 3 and 4 we follow Kasparov and Waitzkin through France on an exhibition tour in April 1990, culminating in the Immopar Trophée rapid tournament in Paris. Here chess gradually takes over from politics, and we read fascinating descriptions of several key games. As a chessplayer, during these sections I often wished that game scores, or at least a few diagrams, were included. But if I really wanted to replay the games, I could probably have found the scores elsewhere, perhaps in back issues of Inside Chess, and certainly their incorporation would have scared away readers with a more casual interest in chess.

Unfortunately, after beginning so strongly, Waitzkin pauses for all of Chapter 5 to tell the story of Gata and Rustam Kamsky. It is surely an interesting story, skillfully told, of two bizarre characters-and by Waitzkin's account, dangerous ones-but it does little to illuminate Kasparov's life. The champion appears only briefly in this chapter, to crush Kamsky in their 1989 two-game match at the New York Public Library. The chapter does cast Kasparov's subsequent antics into relief, making him look entirely normal by comparison to the Kamskys.

At any rate, by Chapter 6 the book gets back on track, describing Kasparov's training regimen for the 1990 championship match and investigating Karpov's side of the rivalry. Waitzkin accurately describes the ex-champion's projection of "sincerity and charm" when you meet him in person, and he admits difficulty in accepting all the bad things people say about Karpov.

I experienced the same surprise at the variance between Karpov's public and private images earlier that same year when he visited Harvard University. (Waitzkin erroneously calls Harvard "Howard University," and describes a press conference Karpov gave there as a "speech.") During our lunch at Harvard, Karpov spoke enthusiastically about two subjects: his own political activities in the "peace movement" and alleged flaws in Kasparov's character. In particular, he claimed that Kasparov's book The Test of Time, often hailed as a modern classic, is riddled with errors. Supposedly a Candidate Master in the Soviet Union had sent to Karpov a 300-page manuscript picking apart Kasparov's opus. "Of course, we didn't have time to check it all, but we picked 10 of his claims and found that he was right in six cases," said Karpov.

Just Look At the Pictures

Ironically, Karpov had come to Harvard hot on the heels of his nemesis, whose own visit took place in late 1989 (around the time of Waitzkin's first meeting with Kasparov, too early to be included in the book). At the time, Kasparov was taking a lot of heat from the media regarding his views on female chessplayers' abilities, or inherent lack thereof, which he stated in his controversial Playboy interview and repeated in a question-and-answer session at Harvard. Just before his last public appearance during that trip to the United States, Kasparov collared me as I was escorting him into the room where he was to speak. In front of a hundred or so spectators, he blamed me personally for his difficulties with the local press. The Boston Globe had highlighted the "women issue" in its otherwise positive coverage, and the campus newspaper reporters were asking what he perceived as inane and repetitive questions. I had already experienced his moodiness and unpredictability, qualities Waitzkin portrays vividly, but not his temper. Naturally I was taken aback, and did not manage to offer any coherent defense to Kasparov's complaints, which were punctuated with piercing stares of disgust. According to him, it was my job as assistant organizer to make sure that the press was properly managed and that his time was not wasted. Perhaps our distributing copies of the Playboy article as background material was not what he had in mind. Fortunately, Kasparov's British agent Andrew Page quickly smoothed things over, and the show went on more or less as planned.

Page, as well as members of Kasparov's family and his chess team during the early 1990s, appear as supporting characters in Chapters 7 and 8 of Mortal Games, titled "New York" and "Lyon," which together comprise over one-third of the book. These chapters provide wonderful background and perspective on the fascinating chess produced in the fifth Kasparov-Karpov match, but they are marred by digressions about a New York newspaper reporter who is interesting but peripheral to the action. The final two chapters, "The Traveling Chess Salesman" and "Linares," cover the public-relations and tournament-circuit sides of Kasparov's life, and the epilogue ties everything together nicely.

Throughout the book, we see in Waitzkin's closeup lens a different Kasparov from the media version: a Kasparov who can sympathize at times with his archrival Karpov, a Kasparov who can step back occasionally from the day-to-day chess wars to look at the larger context, a Kasparov who can confide that Rustam Kamsky "is a character. The chess world is better for him being there." We also see the dark side of Kasparov. While the book's extremely favorable portrayal hardly makes Kasparov out to be the "criminal" or "pathological liar" described by Bobby Fischer, it gives some credence to Nigel Short's milder description of an "unpleasant" person. Waitzkin's account acknowledges Kasparov's moodiness, his voluble personality, and his considerable temper from the subtitle on, and does not shrink from pointing out some inconsistencies in Kasparov's positions and attitudes over the years.

Eat Like a Supergrandmaster

Mortal Games also presents some revelations. Kasparov told Waitzkin in January 1993 that he had planned to break with FIDE, but in 1996 rather than just one month later. Waitzkin notes that Kasparov's wife regularly packs a pistol when walking the streets of Moscow, and reports (on the lighter side) that Kasparov practiced jokes in advance for his "Late Night with David Letterman" appearances. But the book's greatest strength is in describing afresh people and events with which we think we are already familiar, and not just Kasparov, Karpov, and the 1990 world championship match. Some of the most memorable passages show how the changing fortunes of the players at Linares 1991 were reflected in their appearances at dinner after each round, descriptions of the kind that rarely appear in magazine coverage of tournaments and will never make it into Informant symbols or ChessBase data files:

What is missing from Mortal Games? Not much, though it does not have an index, or even a table of contents. It is written to be read as a single narrative, like a novel. But with its wealth of unique information and quotations, it is bound to do considerable extra duty as a reference work, and should have been designed to serve that function. Beyond adding these elements and further sharpening the focus on Kasparov by eliminating the detours to Kamsky and other side-issues, not much more could be done to improve this excellent book. Except writing a sequel.

This page last modified on 28 April 2018.
Copyright (c) 1995-2018 Christopher F. Chabris. All rights reserved.