Hein Donner, The Biography

En utvidet engelskspråklig utgave av biografien om den profilerte avdøde nederlandske stormesteren og sjakkjournalisten Hein Donner. Til slutt i boka 34 kommenterte partier med blant annet seirene hans mot spillere som Bobby Fischer og Bent Larsen.

Forlagets egen omtale:

Hein Donner (1927-1988) was a Dutch Grandmaster and one the greatest writers on chess of all time. He was born into a prominent Calvinistic family of lawyers in The Hague. His father, who had been the Minister of Justice and later became President of the Dutch Supreme Court, detected a keen legal talent in his son. But Hein opted for a bohemian lifestyle as a chess professional and journalist. He scored several excellent tournament victories but never quite fulfilled the promise of his chess talent.

Hein Donner developed from a chess player-writer into a writer-chess player. His provocative writings and his colourful persona made him a national celebrity during the roaring sixties. His book ‘The King’, a fascinating and often hilarious anthology spanning 30 years of chess writing, is a world-wide bestseller and features on many people’s list of favourite chess books.

The author Harry Mulisch, his best friend, immortalized Hein Donner in his magnum opus The Discovery of Heaven. In 2001 the book was adapted for film, with Stephen Fry playing the part that was based on Donner. Included in Hein Donner is the interview in which Harry Mulisch tells about his friendship with Donner.

After suffering a stroke at the age of 56, Donner lived his final years in a nursing home. He continued writing however, typing with one finger, and won one of the Netherlands’ most prestigious literary awards. Alexander Münninghoff has written a captivating biography of a controversial man and the turbulent time and age he lived in.

Alexander Münninghoff is an award-winning author from the Netherlands. He wrote the acclaimed biography of the man that was dethroned by Hein Donner as Dutch champion: former World Chess Champion Max Euwe. His memoir ‘The Son and Heir’ with the complex story of the Münninghoff family in the 20th century, is an international bestseller.

“Well-done by Münninghoff, instead of hopping from anecdote to anecdote, his first concern is always the flow of the narrative. There is a lot in the book that I didn’t know.” -- Hans Ree, author of The Human Comedy of Chess

Fra forordet til denne engelske utgaven:

But that was just the way Hein was – a grandmaster who didn’t have a board and pieces in his own home most of the time, who discovered Chess Informant by coincidence at a time when it had been an indispensable tool for all his colleagues for years already, who, partly because of this, was beaten with black before move 20 in the same variation of the Sicilian twice in a short time span, and who, in spite of this, hardly ever took any account of the fact that his opponents were people who made plans too – but who also managed to win great tournaments like Hoogovens 1963 and Venice 1967, ahead of a whole range of top players.

Fortunately, Donner left us an extensive oeuvre which encompasses much more than just chess. He enjoyed a legendary friendship with one of the greatest Dutch writers ever, Harry Mulisch (whose book The Discovery of Heaven is largely about Donner), and, with his many columns and books, gradually grew to be a well-known Dutchman. That is what he remained until his death in 1988. In the years before that, after a brain haemorrhage, typing with one finger, he couldn’t produce much more than one hundred lines a week. But this did result in a collection of fantastic ‘incunabula’, or ‘sparkling minima’ as the columnist Renate Rubinstein called them, which earned him a great Dutch literary prize right at the end of his life.

For the chess world, Hein Donner lives on in The King, the book that is called ‘the thick Donner’ in Dutch chess circles. In this marvellous anthology, Tim Krabbé and Max Pam, two laureated authors themselves, have included Donner’s best chess pieces.