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Paolo Maurensig. La variante di Luneburg. Milan. Adelphi. 1993. 158 pages. L.20,000.
La variante di Luneburg is a first novel by a fifty-year-old Udine businessman. Its title a reference to a fictional chess maneuver, the work is set in present-day Germany and Austria among German-speaking characters. Much of the book's action, however, is recounted through a long conversation on the Munich-Vienna express that reevokes first the 1970s, then the more sinister decades of the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of Hitler, on to the years of World War II. This extended flashback concludes with a macabre chess match at the Bergen-Belsen death camp, an event that links the past to...