The Absolute at Large
Translated by Sarka B Hrbkova
Free public-domain edition — preview in your browser, no account required for the first chapter.
Preview free · sign up to save progress, download to your shelf, and sync with the apps
Already have an account? Sign in
This prescient novel offers a brilliant, darkly comic critique of technology, religion, and human nature that remains startlingly relevant in an age of AI and ideological conflict.
Edition details
Book Summary
In 1943, an inventor creates the Karburator, a machine that releases infinite atomic energy and, as a byproduct, the Absolute or God. This technological miracle triggers mass religious ecstasy, economic collapse, and global warfare, satirizing humanity's inability to handle absolute power and truth.
Industrialist G. H. Bondy invests in Rudy Marek's Karburator, which disintegrates matter to produce limitless energy but also liberates the Absolute, causing religious mania worldwide. As the Absolute spreads, it leads to overproduction, economic chaos, and competing sects claiming exclusive access to God. Religious conflicts escalate into a devastating global war from 1944 to 1953, marked by absurd battles and the rise of secular dictators like Lieutenant Bobinet. The war ends not with victory but with exhausted soldiers simply going home. Years later, the Karburator movement is suppressed, and characters debate faith and reason in a tavern, highlighting the enduring human struggle with absolutes. Bondy, stranded on a coral island, reflects on how people use fragments of God to justify violence, while farmers pragmatically resist the economic madness by maintaining scarcity.
Reading guide
Go deeper in The Absolute at Large
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
G. H. Bondy
Bondy is the Chairman of the M.E.C. and the money behind the atomic motor, a man who trusts organization, profit, and common sense. When the Absolute begins manufacturing goods for free and inspiring mystical Communism in his workers, his worldly confidence curdles into a desperate, clear-eyed struggle to understand an adversary he cannot buy or outmaneuver. His running debate with Marek over whether the Absolute follows a plan or merely improvises gives the novel its central argument about power, industry, and faith.
Rudy Marek
Marek built the atomic motor and unwittingly unleashed the Absolute, and now he watches its career with the cool, obsessive eye of a scientist compiling evidence. Where Bondy fears the Absolute, Marek studies it, convinced its miracles are unsystematic improvisations rather than divine strategy. His running analysis of its economic and political blunders makes him the novel's sharpest, most skeptical counterweight to the spreading faith.
Jan Binder
Binder is a small-time showman whose Karburator-powered merry-go-round becomes one of the many humble vessels through which the Absolute reaches ordinary people. The narrator lingers on him with obvious affection, refusing to reduce him to a footnote in a historical synthesis. His wandering, striped-jersey existence embodies the novel's insistence that the great cosmic upheaval is lived out in the small, particular lives of unremarkable men.
Cyril Keval
Keval is a working journalist, polite enough to give up his place to a lady and lose his spot at the ceremony, resourceful enough to scale a wall and peer through a grating at the dignitaries inside. His eye for the pompous details of the Central Power Station's unveiling, and his veteran colleague Cvancara's suspicion that something will go wrong, frame the reader's first look at the Karburator's public debut. He matters as the novel's roving witness, the man who notices what the official speeches leave out.
Father Jost
Father Jost stands at the point where the Absolute's religious manifestations collide with established faith, facing conversions, levitations, and ecstasies that arrive through paths the Church never sanctioned. The novel's chronicler describes the Absolute bursting into personal and social life along well-trodden religious routes, but to an extent hitherto unheard of, and Jost is the figure who must reckon with what that means for doctrine. His struggle gives the early spread of the Absolute its theological weight and its sense of genuine spiritual crisis.
Kuzenda
Kuzenda, with his companion Brych, presides over a small riverside community where coffee multiplies for hundreds of guests and the Absolute's presence is felt as an overwhelming, wordless love. He insists the God within cannot bear politics, money, intellect, or pride, and that His greatest miracle is the transformation of feeling. His earnest, democratic faith offers the novel one of its warmest and most human portraits of what the Absolute actually does to ordinary believers.
Technology and Religion
The book explores the fusion of industrial technology with the divine, as Marek's Karburator mechanically releases the Absolute, leading to mass religious experiences, miracles, and the commodification of God.
Overproduction and Economic Collapse
The Absolute's infinite, uncontrolled production of goods (like tacks) causes market saturation, devaluation, and the breakdown of distribution, illustrating the absurdity of boundless plenty without economic order.
Human Nature and Morality
The release of the Absolute exposes human flaws—greed, hypocrisy, and selfishness—while also triggering genuine altruism and religious fervor, highlighting the duality of human response to divine presence.
Religious Conflict and War
The universal spread of the Absolute leads to competing national and sectarian claims over 'the true God,' sparking ideological wars, as seen in the battles and diplomatic disputes over whose God is legitimate.