He died almost in public oblivion, seven years ago now, in the solitude of Sant Cugat del Vallés, where even his neighbors did not know who that solitary man was. But, due to the chances of life, Arturo Pomar is having a second life. A new life of paper. The Pawn, the story of the chess prodigy Arturo Pomar written by Paco Cerdà, was published this week in Catalan by the Ara Llibres publishing house.
Also this week the French-language paperback edition is published, where Le pion has been a finalist for the Best Foreign Book Award published in France and nominated for four other awards: Prix littéraire des Avignonnais, Prix Virevolte, Grand Prix de la Traduction de la Ville d’Arles and Prix Pierre-François Caillé de la Translation. In addition, the book will be published next year in English in the United States, after The New York Times and The Times echoed its story, and will also have a Portuguese edition in Brazil.
Beyond the role, Arturo Pomar has gained popular knowledge and recognition in Sant Cugat del Vallés, where he lived much of his life. There, the reactivation of his figure has led the full council to approve a municipal agreement to dedicate a street or square in the city to him, which has not yet materialized.
His story, beyond the seven Spanish championships won and being the first Spaniard to achieve the distinction of International Grandmaster, was seen with certain connections with the protagonist of Queen’s Gambit.
As Paco Cerdà explains, “in the figure of Arturito Pomar is the epic of the Mallorcan child prodigy who, at only twelve years old, drew the world chess champion and became a pop icon of a hungry, backward and gray country. There is also the poetry of a game that is art, that is science, that is sport, that is as brutal as boxing in a black and white ring, with invisible blows in the minds. But there is, above all, the drama of the antihero: the child prodigy exploited to the point of exhaustion by the Franco regime and then abandoned by the regime when he was needed most, before that mythical and forgotten game played in Stockholm, in the winter of 1962. , against another pawn of the Cold War, Bobby Fischer.”
Starting from that game as a conduit thread, El peó unfolds a chronicle about the lives of numerous “peons” dedicated to a cause in Franco’s Spain or in Kennedy’s United States of that turbulent 1962. “Pawns” who sacrificed their lives — History in lowercase letters—in the name of a side: communism, anarchism, the maquis, workerism, socialism, ETA terrorism, social Christianity, the Republic in exile, the student movement or Falangism. On the American side, these “pawns” took very different forms: the anti-racist struggle of Black Power, the anti-nuclear pacifist movement, the university New Left, the defense of indigenous peoples or the anti-communist war at the service of the Army in Cuba or the USSR. .
This non-fiction story, which received the Cálamo Award for Best Book in Spain, delves into personal political commitment, chess and power, and about the meaning and personal implications of surrendering to or being used by a side and, then, paying for it a price of death, prison, exile, surveillance or loneliness. But, especially, Paco Cerdà – also the author of April 14 and The Last Ones – rescues the figure of a pop icon from NODO who started as a paper hero in newspapers and has now returned to paper.
