Reviews

The Absolute by Daniel Guebel

Only show reviews with written explanations

_cherish's review

challenging slow-paced

Weird.

I'm surprised to see how well-reviewed this book has been. I read it for a book club, but I wouldn't have finished it otherwise. It tells an impossibly complex story of multiple generations of self-proclaimed geniuses pursuing a variety of mad follies and falling short. Their exploits are often bawdy and absurd, and they have a Forrest Gump-style habit of bumping into and influencing major historical figures.

There are plenty of wonderful ideas and vignettes throughout this novel, but they simply don't have room to breathe. Single pages will cover years at a time. Every time something compelled me, the author moved on briskly to something else. This book is so dense with "stuff" that nothing really stands out. It loses any sense of rhythm or intrigue in its desperation to cram in new layers of complexity. It feels like a million paragraph-long summaries of other, smaller books.

The obvious inspirations, I'd say, are Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Miguel de Cervantes, all of whom I love. The difference is that those writers were hysterically funny and deeply engaged with human feeling. Guebel has taken cues from their playful use of alternate history, arcane knowledge, and opulent detail, but he's left behind the emotion.

victoria_madler's review

Go to review page

challenging informative mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

This was just a very long-winded and difficult to understand book. I appreciated the depth and complexity of the ideas, and the author clearly knew the subjects he was writing about, but I was tempted to DNF it the entire second half of the book. Luckily, I stuck with it, and recognize that there is a lot of literary value in this book, but enjoyment-wise, I’d give it three stars. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart-very dense reading.