Dove va ciò che non è piú — persone, cose d’un tempo? Se uno Specchio le ha viste, le conserva per sempre nel suo abisso interiore, là nella Pianura della Verità, dove regnano gli Scacchi, gli archetipi increati delle cose.
Infatti ciò che è stato è sempre, l’Essere è tutto ora, e “né il nascere né il perire gli concesse Dike allentando i legami”. E lo Specchio della Coscienza è la sua casa eterna, giacché “lo stesso è pensare ed essere”.
Un omaggio a Parmenide e Platone dal teorico del «realismo magico», che ben sapeva, come i Greci, che la magia piú meravigliosa è la metafisica. ( )

By current standards, this is probably just shy of 4 stars. But for a book written in 1922, it's pretty good. There's a Phantom Tollbooth vibe to it--a boy crosses through to another world he never knew existed, and encounters all kinds of strange residents, and it's written with a great deal of humor. It's short and quick (for 115 pages, there are 24 chapters and several full-page illustrations, and the type is pretty big), which helps the story move along. The lack of resolution at the end is a little annoying ("I went to sleep and when I woke up I was back"--thankfully not an it-was-all-a-dream ending, but there was no explanation at all of how he arrived back on the right side of the mirror), but it doesn't detract much from the overall quality. ( )

Queer little tale. A bit interesting, a dash pointless, a cup of imagination. ( )

What is it about mirrors that fascinates and enchants? I don’t think it is the narcissistic appeal of looking at ourselves, even backwards. Most people, I think, aren’t so pleased to see what they really look like in a mirror. We rarely like to face the truth about ourselves.

I think instead it is the illusion of space, another world, the hint of things around the corner, not seen. In this way mirrors are eerie, sometimes reflecting unexpected things as we shift a little to the left or right. Mirrors are supposed to catch the light and brighten a room, but equally they disorient us, showing light where none should be, or blackness where light is expected. It isn’t hard to imagine them as windows or doors, not reflections—dark, hazy entrances to other, unknown places.

Clearly the metaphor of a mirror is as endless as its reflections.

When a little book called The Chess Set in the Mirror by Massimo Bontempelli (trans. by Estelle Gilson) came into my hands, I was thinking about chess, not mirrors. But it is the nature of mirrors that is at the heart of the story. It will sound a little familiar. A small boy who has been misbehaving is locked in a room by his parents, who sternly warn him not to touch the mirror as they shut the door. It sits high up on a mantle, and naturally with an admonishment like that, the boy can’t keep away from it. The only other things in the room are a chess set upon a small table, in the middle of the room, and hence reflected in the mirror. The boy is not, because he is too short to see himself.

For several minutes he devotes his energies towards trying to see his own reflection, and it is no surprise that after awhile he finds that he has ended up in the mirror, on the other side. The White King of the reflected chess set, we are given to understand, is the culprit responsible for this sudden change in the nature of his existence.

But here any similarities between Lewis Carroll’s Alice, daydreaming of the world inside her looking-glass, and Bontempelli’s lad, daydreaming about his, are at an end. For while Alice found herself in another room of another house, this little boy finds himself on an infinite plain: “I thought that it would look just like back there, a room with a fireplace and a blue wall,” protests the boy. Once you go past the wall, answers the White King, everything changes.

As fantasia goes, (the author was the first to coin the term “magical realism”), it is more allegorical than most—more so even than Alice and her looking glass adventures. Alice wanders through the looking-glass land bemused but generally well-behaved and polite. The narrator of this story—who, let us remember, was the kind of child a parent felt obligated to lock away in a room—is more than usually judgmental about the place he finds himself, and the people he meets there. One of his first impulses, when the White King says something he regards as silly and useless, is to punch him. (He restrains himself, but only because he doesn’t want to break the mirror.)

Nor is the boy overly impressed with the other people he meets. Anyone who has ever looked into the mirror is there, but they are static, frozen at the point at which their reflection was captured. Because it is a very old mirror, many of them are from different generations and eras altogether; he meets his grandmother as a young woman, a couple from an earlier era who once met in front of the mirror to declare their love, a burglar who snuck past the mirror while escaping the house (he is friends with the young grandmother), and a couple of laconic porters who must have carried the mirror to its current spot on the mantle. He does not meet his parents—perhaps they never actually looked into that mirror. Nor are there any other children—presumably because the mirror sits too high up for them to look into it.

It is a pointless and purposeless group of people, who talk endless nonsense and walk in circles on the endless plain, doing nothing with perfect equanimity. This frustrates the little boy:

“I think you’re all lazy,” I retorted

“Why?” he asked, meekly.

“Because you don’t do anything.”

“What should we be doing?”

The question, put by the nonplussed White King, throws the boy, who obviously believes in the benefits of industry because he ventures a vague suggestion that the mirror-people should “earn a living, study, think of your future.”

Which, he realizes almost as he says it, was a completely futile line to take with a group of people forever frozen in time. Reason and logic are useless here.

Eventually the boy gives up and wanders away from the group, intent on exploring, although of course the view is not promising: white, blank space stretching as far as he can see in any direction. But the blankness is deceptive. What he can see is not necessarily a good indication of what is there, and this bothers him. When Alice, wandering through her looking glass world, meets the White Knight, he is a genial character who spends a lot of time almost falling off his horse. But when the boy (he remains nameless in the story) meets the knights of his mirror-chess set, they are being ridden by the bishops—black bishops on white horses, white bishops on black horses, and the boy is conscious that the riders have no arms or hands to hold the reigns, and the horses no legs with which to gallop, and yet his impression of legs and arms is so strong, he can’t shake the notion that they exist. It makes him uneasy, to shake hands with chess pieces who have no hands, and to walk alongside them when they have no legs.

As he wanders away from his frustrating companions, he finds himself going up a hill (although everything still looks flat), then through a wood—he can hear the wind in the leaves of the trees—and along what he thinks must be a seashore—the waves seem to be breaking right at his feet. But he sees nothing but the white flat plain and he is almost afraid to step forward, lest he drown in some invisible ocean.

Uneasy, unsettling and eerie. One can see where the author’s notion of “magical realism” comes from.

The Chess Set in the Mirror, originally published in 1922, is marketed as a children’s story, but it doesn’t feel like one. Its absurdities and fantastic constructions are funny, but also disturbing. Reviewers have compared the book to The Little Prince because of its philosophical undercurrent. But the story reminds me more of Doctor Seuss at his creepiest—the “flight of fancy” of a slightly demented imagination. That is a compliment. Great stories often have a dose of madness in them. Children, always accommodating when it comes to the willing suspension of disbelief and untroubled by the deeper philosophical questions of existence and morality, will be entertained. But adults, inured in a rational existence and whose faith in the general goodness of the world has been shaken by experience, will shift uneasily in their seats as they read. They will question the inconsistencies in this mirror-world. And they will not be able to ignore the one ever-present threat that overshadows the story—that the mirror could break at any moment and all the people in it (including the boy who ought not even be there) wink out of existence in a kind of metaphysical Armageddon. You can tell that this book was written in the aftermath of a world war.

Alice mostly enjoyed wandering around the Looking Glass world. The boy, however, becomes frantic to get back, out of the mirror and into reality. The White King attempts to reassure him that this is the real world, that it is the boy, and all the people on his side “who are nothing but images, apparitions, without substance.” The boy is not reassured. He eventually does escape, through the same mysterious process that had put him into the mirror in the first place. And when he opens his eyes at last, his mother is there calling his name, and reaching out a hand to lead him out of the room. He goes, with only one backward glance at the chess set reflected in the mirror.

But for the rest of his life, he is unable to play chess. It unnerves him too much.