The World Played Chess – Dugoni’s Beautiful Symbiosis of Writer and Reader

Reading Robert Dugoni’s The World Played Chess is akin to dabbing on a pleasing perfume. As it seeps into your skin and melds with you, you realize the synergy between scent and skin has created something extraordinary. Dugoni brilliantly winds his way through three narratives. The first is Vincent Bianco’s present-day life, in which he navigates the deceptively mundane waters of suburbia with his wife and their two teenagers. The second is Vincent’s memory of the time he spent working on a construction site with the wise and kind Vietnam veteran William Goldman. The last component of the triad is William’s Vietnam War Journal, which he’s recently sent to Vincent.

Once you begin to read, a fourth narrative asserts itself. These are the readers’ personal and/or family stories about the Vietnam Era, the photos and newsreels, and the emotional impression they hold of the war. There is also the conjured brain-image of the boys who were sent to Vietnam and came home broken men with no way to process the horrors they’d endured. These blend with Dugoni’s narrative strains to create a beautiful symbiosis of writer and reader, making the most complex and subtly intoxicating perfume. The World Played Chess will pull up a different emotional landscape for every reader who turns its pages, creating a living, breathing novel that will live as long as there are those to read it.

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