A Family of Geniuses and Their Search for Transcendence

THE ABSOLUTE
By Daniel Guebel
Translated by Jessica Sequeira

Daniel Guebel’s novel — his fifteenth, although the primary to seem in English — is a quixotic enterprise involved with a quixotic enterprise based on a need to grasp and memorialize a succession of quixotic enterprises. For many of its size, “The Absolute” takes the type of a gaggle biography, a labor of affection by an unnamed feminine narrator making an attempt to protect the lives of 5 outsize male forebears — what her son calls a “chronicle of my household’s geniuses.” The end result, revealed in Argentina in 2016, is each exhausting and exhilarating, not by turns however on the similar time, by advantage of the identical selections and thrives.

The story begins with the disclosing of a tasteless sculpture commissioned in honor of a pair of twins: the narrator’s father, the pianist Sebastian Deliuskin; and her uncle, Alexander Scriabin, an actual composer admired by Stravinsky and Glenn Gould who has been inserted — for causes that by no means grow to be specific — into this heaving fictional family tree. The narrator dismisses the “cubist eyesore,” and with out throat-clearing, apology or segue, gives by the use of recompense or riposte a “homage” of her personal — verbal in type, corrective in intention (“treacherous posterity” being endlessly given to error), dogged but digressive in its habits, inherently conjectural, masking two centuries and each hemispheres, and portraying alongside the way in which Napoleon Bonaparte, Franz Ferdinand and Madame Blavatsky.

The title baldly states the theme. Every successive narrative facilities on the seek for transcendence, with the chosen websites of inquiry being intercourse, theology, theosophy, political motion and, above all, musical experimentation, beginning with the “xylophonic efficiency method” developed by the narrator’s great-great-grandfather, Frantisek Deliuskin, within the 18th century. The environment is unflaggingly cerebral, each involved with erudition and depending on it. An accompanying “word” from Guebel’s translator, Jessica Sequeira, offers 16 pages of exegesis, together with a piece titled “Egg (Philosophy)” that explains the picture on the entrance cowl of a damaged eggshell (“an emblem of absolutely the, each contained complete and origin”).

The novel of concepts often hinges on the counterintuitive analogy — symbolic affiliations that sweep apart superficial trappings. On this case, inherited fascinated about the opposition between idea and apply, the magical and materialist, is examined and located wanting. Frantisek’s son, Andrei, for instance, a someday pupil of ballistics, numismatics, archaeology and metaphysics, finally ends up producing annotations of Ignatius of Loyola’s “Religious Workouts” that, in revealing group prayer as “a conspiratorial exercise,” function an inspiration to Lenin.

If Guebel’s style for colliding paradoxes and collapsing dichotomies suggests a debt to Borges, then the worldliness, wild comedy and encroachment on the terrain of recorded truth recall Saul Bellow, who specialised within the hapless hero satisfied that erudition would assist him crack the code of existence. Or it is perhaps characterised as a tribute to “Sunday within the Park With George,” the Sondheim-Lapine musical about obsessive creativity that crosses generations, however reconceived by the Tom Stoppard of “Jumpers” and “Travesties.”

The central high quality on provide is the satisfying congruence of theme and type. The e book we’re studying, or the invented e book it encases, is an embodiment of the questing syndrome below scrutiny, whereas Guebel himself, in composing a late-modernist hybrid of essay, psychoanalytic case examine, historical past lesson, saga and farce, shows greater than his share of signs. The novel’s remaining part serves up a clinching twist, revealing the human price of the biographical legwork and likewise hinting at its deeper function. The previous is outlined not simply by its telling however by the teachings it could bequeath, Guebel reveals, and within the course of, rounds off his personal Deliuskin-like grand imaginative and prescient.