Love and Other Games of Chance
Using the game of snakes and ladders as an organizing principle, Siegel has constructed a work of 100 almost perfectly equal chapters to be read in the order presented or by sliding back and forth as the rules indicate. Magic and illusion form the core of this book, whether at Wild West shows or circuses. The story begins at the lowest point of the Dead Sea at the winter solstice of 1899 and ends on the peak of Everest at the summer solstice of 1946. In between we have followed the career of Isaac Schlossberg and the bizarre cast of characters who witness its twists and turns.
The tightrope walker he calls angel meets him while he earns his living charming snakes. As the principal love of his life, she pops up in many of the book’s hundred sections, especially on the ones where ladders throw the narrative forward or snakes drop it back. His attachment to her does not prevent experiments with a female pilot in the early days of erotic aviation. A fake feral child gains fame as the boy raised by tigers who is a reincarnation of Warren Hastings. We are told that Bachnele Poopik, the Yiddish-speaking dwarf who is irresistible to women, has “stooped” Eleanor Roosevelt.
This is one of the details which make us think Siegel relied more on invention than history, but you can’t prove a universal negative, as one of his characters observes.
This novel does not conform to much of what makes an historical novel, but it delivers the novelty it promises. Sprinkled throughout the text we find colorful Yiddish, appropriate Bengali and the universal language of magic.
