Absub may be an invented name here, but the idea behind Beginnings centers on a bold triple expression that shapes the entire work. The opening moment sets a counterintuitive rhythm: denial that feels more like a doorway to affirmation. This is the book’s guiding paradox. Its very first line signals a pattern that recurs throughout: a refusal that still tests the boundaries of what it could mean to say yes. The structure of the novel mirrors this paradox with a deliberate, almost mathematical focus on the number three. Three forms, three moods, three moments of life’s possibilities—all bound together by a single, evolving question about meaning.
Divided into three scenes, the narrative moves through silence, history, and celebration, each presenting a distinct mode of approaching life. The central figure inhabits three lives that are the same person in different frames, each saying yes in a way that suits the moment. In the final scene, this yes hovers on the brink of completion, leaving a sense of suspended possibility. The hinge between the three moments lies in how each form of reception—religious, revolutionary, and artistic—arrives through its own channel: contemplation in the religious arc, action in the revolutionary arc, and writing in the artistic arc. The effect is less a linear progression than a chorus of chances, a chorus that never resolves into a single, tidy ending.
In this work, the plot is less a map of events than a field for reflection. The narrator disturbs the boundaries between realism and the absurd, inviting readers to sense a reality that does not conform to ordinary logic. A dreamlike alignment with surreal possibility becomes the framework for understanding, a choice to foreground perception over conventional cause and effect. The influence of classic dreamers of meaning is palpable, with hints of a world where the ordinary rules do not always apply. The final chapter, especially in its party scene, brings to mind the tension of a grand, empty stage—where the sense of purpose seems to drift, and where the pursuit of a voice that can resonate with others remains imperfectly achieved. The recurring motif of absence and delay, particularly around the editorial phone lines or meetings with publishers, adds to the sense that time itself is a kind of unfinished business.
The title anchors the journey in three births or beginnings, but the path does not unfold through a straightforward cause-and-effect logic. The protagonist evolves, if at all, in fits and starts, yet the narrative resists a neat biography. The other figures around him appear as silhouettes of present moment awareness, not as fully fleshed histories, emphasizing the book’s emphasis on immediate experience over retrospective explanation. The three lives are separate yet linked by the triad of yeses that seem to sweep away uncertainty, echoing a ritual of acceptance that neither fully confirms nor renounces doubt. The central conflict becomes not a dramatic triumph but a philosophical question: how to validate a life when meaning feels slippery and elusive. Beginnings emerges as a rigorous, almost exhausting exploration of doubt, and a candid search for a resolute yes that could anchor a sense of reality—without fully delivering it.