The Absolute

Starred review from March 14, 2022
Argentine writer Guebel’s exceptional English-language debut serves up the multigenerational tale of the historical Deliuskin-Scriabin family, a motley bunch of artists, scientists, and politicians. Guebel begins with the story of composer Frantisek Deliuskin, who, in 18th-century Russia, finds inspiration in sex (“It’s like living in a heaven that flows with scents and skins and moans,” he writes in a journal). Then there’s Frantisek’s son, Andrei, orphaned as a child, whose annotations of St. Ignatius Loyola’s work are used by Lenin to organize 1917’s Russian Revolution. Esau Deliuskin, Andrei’s son, leads a Robin Hood–style gang, escapes from prison after being convicted for an assassination attempt on Archduke Franz Ferdinand, then leads a failed socialist settlement. Esau’s son, Alexander Scriabin, who is lost in a crowd at age three from his mother and twin, Sebastian, before the others embark for Buenos Aires, is raised for a time by Russian soldiers and later employed by a controversial writer and mystic. Later, he becomes a famous pianist with an unfinished masterpiece. Sebastian Deliuskin, who grows up in Argentina and also becomes a pianist, has a daughter who narrates the book. As the characters experience love, jealousy, and despair, Guebel offers erudite meditations on music, art, and philosophy, all marked by a superb use of language. This is best savored slowly.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
Intellectually adventurous, multigenerational novel of a family's quest to find meaning in the world. We meet our narrator early on in this sprawling novel, but we get to know him only near its end. Meanwhile, Argentine writer Guebel serves up an entertaining shaggy dog--or perhaps shaggy cat, considering the unpleasant fate at the paws of a feline that a minor character suffers--tale that stretches over three centuries. Frantisek is a wayward young man who hires a music tutor and then heads for Siberia to teach lessons to the wives of the provincial bourgeoisie, which lands him a "career as a clandestine lover." Frantisek attempts to make of his dangerous liaisons a sort of symphony that, in time, grows into what might be "rightly considered to have been the first symphonic poem," Berlioz notwithstanding. Frantisek's son transposes the family gift for systematics into a political philosophy built on the Jesuit precepts of Ignatius Loyola, one that years later finds an acolyte in Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, who, our narrator proposes, invented the Russian working class just as St. Paul invented a messiah: "Such a political gesture--which no 'leftist' understood at the time--clearly reveals to us that [Lenin] took maximum advantage of the lessons imparted during his months at the monastery." Another ancestor decides to try his luck at assassinating an archduke and touching off a war only to wind up in a game of cat and mouse in a distant desert prison, while Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander Scriabin, Madame Blavatsky, and other historical figures step onto the stage to play roles large and small. And as for that narrator? Let's just say that he does the family proud, deftly stepping from historical fiction to science fiction and witnessing "the Universe just prior to its unfolding, naked of any wrapping, like one of those hard bitter candies that taste of pitch and melt like a rock in your mouth." A Borges-ian masterwork that neatly blends magic realism, mysticism, and off-color yarns into a superb whole.

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