In Ohio at the turn of this century, the wife of Dr Uyterhoeven receives a series of strange letters from her husband, who reports being shipwrecked on his way to South Africa, and landing in a fantastical country inhabited by chess pieces, dominoes and dice.
Intercut with these letters, the story of his life unfolds: his youth and marriage in Holland, his troubled scientific career in Berlin, the genesis of his unusual philosophy and of the chess garden. History and allegory are expertly interwoven in this tale of spiritual progress, a novel of dazzling imagination.
A wonderfully bewitching compendium of stories told in a pellucid prose that is free of any stylistic gimmickry. A highly absorbing and endlessly inventive antipodean adventure.
