A small unknown wonder

This is a little-known novel by Malraux in which he said in his excerpts Antimemoires. Two intrigues them collide: the confinement of a young man in a French prison camp installed in the Chartres Cathedral on the one hand and the course of the father 20 years before the other. The latter was adviser to a Turkish sultan Enver Pasha in the Ottoman Empire and took part in ending the war 14 German side (the novel takes place in Alsace). Schizophrenia in the region is well symbolized by the fate of two successive members of the same family. The story mixes share (it evokes the war, travel) and philosophical reflections on the meaning of history (one feels the double influence of Nietzsche and Hegel).

This novel deserves to be rediscovered because it is one of the great stories of the crisis of European consciousness in the early 20th century and has a depth comparable to the tentaion of the West.