Customer Reviews

The Quest of the Absolute (European Classics)

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I was very excited to read this book I received as a gift from my wish list when the very first sentence started as a fragment... turns out every paragraph has a fatal editing error and even whole sentences and paragraphs are excluded. I have never been so horrified about the level of disinterest the publisher must have had in actually printing this version of the book--no one even noticed the first paragraph of the book was missing??? Small print on the inside cover states that because of the low cost of production there "might" be some spelling errors that "could we please overlook?" COME ON! Maybe a few mistakes would be acceptable, but the entire book is incorrectly punctuated, fragmented, missing words and overall horrendous--It's a shame that Amazon is selling this version of the book, I do not recommend anyone purchasing it.

DO NOT BUY THIS PUBLISHER'S EDITION. I did not know that anything this loaded with printing errors could make it into books being sold. This is incredible. The publisher states that they used optical scanning to produce this book to keep the cost down. They go on that a crease in the pages would cause errors. Furthermore, they then tell you to go to the website and if the book is on the website you can read it there. Take it from me spend extra and get a real book.

A Flamand portrait of the ups and downs on a burgeois family whose head turns deranged about chemical research. The title is not about any moral or philosophical absolute but about the "absolute basic element" that will allow him to transform substances like the good old philosophical stone of the alchemists. Most of the book is about the wreckage that this guy puts on his family while ruining his family a couple times, but the other main characters , his wife, daughter, a pure gentle guy in love with his daughter and a cold and calculating notary public who's also interested in the daughter are quite original, live and real.

Exactly like Flamand paintings it is warm, soft, slow but charming.

On the down side Balzac, being an outsider to science, shows not to have a clear distinction in his mind between a scientist and a crackpot.

You'll have to like slow-rated stories... but that one will seduce you! There's some fantastic in it, with the famous quest of the Philosophal Stone. And also many psychology, with the interaction of all those souls living together in a rich house in Belgium.

The first pages of that book are VERY important, explaining WHY Balzac just does not like to enter his novels "in medias res". Of course he takes his time to explain... So the reticent Balzac reader may understand better the writer. Not bad, eh?