The Pawn on the Chessboard

Irène NémirovskyLe Pion sur l'échiquierSet in France during the economic crisis of the nineteen-thirties, Le Pion sur l'échiquier 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, Némirovsky presents us with an anti-hero whose bleak interior life is an object lesson in alienation and emotional numbness.