Who is this stranger capable of challenging the great Czentovic, the world chess champion, a true prodigy as rough as he is unpleasant? Can we believe, as he claims, that he hasn't played for more than twenty years? This is a mystery that the idle passengers of this luxury liner would love to solve.
The narrator will succeed. The circumstances in which the unknown man acquired this science are terrible. They take us back to the Nazi experiments on the effects of absolute isolation, when, on the borders of madness, between two interrogations, the human brain manages to display its strangest faculties.
A disturbing, fantastic fable, which, as the character says with painful irony, could serve as an illustration of the charming times in which we live .