Winner....
Premio Municipal de la Novela 2021
Premio Nacional de Literatura Argentina 2018
Premio Literario de la Academia Argentina de Letras 2017
Best Novel Award by La Nación 2016
A provocative multigenerational exploration of creative genius, madness,
and family relationships. With the ambition and density of style of
Vladimir Nabokov or Olga Tokarczuk, this is a story both profound and
handled with a light touch.
The Absolute is a sprawling historical novel about the
Deliuskin-Scriabin family, made up of six generations of geniuses and
madmen. Beginning in the mid-18th century in Russia, across Europe and
ending in late 20th-century Argentina, the characters' lives play out in
different branches of art, politics and science in such radical ways
that they transform the world and its reality. The narrator's ancestor,
Frantisek Deliuskin, invents a new form of music in the 18th century;
his son, Andrei Deliuskin, makes some marginal annotations to the
Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola that are later
interpreted by Lenin as an instruction manual to carry out the Russian
Revolution of 1917; Esau Deliuskin, following the course of his father,
creates a socialist utopian society; and down through the generations to
the narrator, whose creation takes him back in time and space to the
moment of the Big Bang.
The Absolute is a monumental work about the creation of art and about
family, about spiritual traditions and about throwing oneself into the
world not to capture life but to create it, in and through words.
"This is a masterpiece at a time when masterpieces seem impossible and
at the same time challenges the very idea of a masterpiece. ... It's the
novel one should read if they want to know what an artist is." --La
Nación
