Author: Daniel Guebel
Translator: Jessica Sequeira
Publisher: Seven Stories
Paperback
Staff Pick! Dan says...
I love Argentine fiction so much because of its particular suffusion of the mundane with gravitas, the injection of magic and the surreal into the everyday, tempered by a heavy dose of intellectual irony. The best examples of this work: Borges, Macedonio Fernandez, send your head swimming and prise open what is possible. In Daniel Guebel, these writers have found a worthy successor. The Absolute is in some ways a classic intergenerational tale, only one that follows a clan of artists - the Deliuskin-Scriabins - whose artistic obsessions border on the occult. In gorgeous prose (lushly translated by Jessica Sequeira), we see members of this family invent experimental noise music, create protective sound barriers around Grigori Rasputin at the height of the pre-revolutionary era of intrigue. This is a tale of modernity, of art’s relationship to the dark forces of the twentieth century. This is a must.