A moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric novel about a young woman’s affair with an Italian aristocrat that leaves her spiraling in the face of love, danger, and obsession.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Molly Dektar’s The Absolutes, which is out now.
When Nora, an anxious and withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy. They forge a sudden, powerful connection in a chairlift several hundred feet above the Alps, where Nicola, brimming with old-world wealth and secrets, eases Nora back from the verge of a panic attack. In an instant, Nora forgets the feelings she’s been harboring for her host sister since arriving in Italy, and a sharper, more reckless feeling takes hold: blind trust and insatiable desire for Nicola.
Years later in New York, when Nicola becomes enmeshed in a covert, high-stakes business venture at the company where Nora works, the two begin an affair. But Nora is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when unrelenting currents of obsession, control, and revenge intensify their passion and entangle her in a secret plot to overthrow Nicola’s corrupt father. Soon, she must decide for herself what makes a person truly evil and what she’s willing to excuse for a chance at total intimacy.
Utterly seductive, fiercely intelligent, and achingly beautiful, The Absolutes is a revealing portrait of a relationship that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Molly Dektar has crafted a hypnotic, provocative, and profound study of desire.
Chapter 1 Excerpt
We left for the bobsled race in the afternoon. At one p.m. it was beginning to get cloudy, although in places the sky was still blue. We wore our matching red Welcome Team uniforms, which were the wrong choice, because they were barely insulated. We boarded a bus to Cesana. There, we took a fully enclosed gondola lift, which Federica called an ovovia, up over the bobsled course, a mass of silvery tubing. In the ovovia, there were two benches facing each other. I sat with my back against the peak of the mountain and watched the course tumble out below her. Federica had wide shoulders and narrow hips. She wore her hair in a low ponytail; she never wore a hat. She had a long straight nose with no dip where it met her forehead, like Augustus Caesar’s profile on coins, and angry eyes that were archaically large, too large for her face.
We got out at the bobsled course, but it was deserted, so we got into another ovovia and made it up over the sci di fondo course to the top of the mountain. Back at Cesana Pariol we built a snowman and I couldn’t tell what language the children were speaking.
We entered the course and walked all around to try to warm ourselves before settling into a spot near the starting line, where the track went vertical and the five rings were printed in blue below the ice. We sat on a platform built for a TV camera, and I chatted with an Alpino in a feathered cap.
Federica ignored me for a long while, as usual, though there was nothing to do but talk to me. Then she made me reach under her red uniform jacket and take her phone out of her right pocket because her hands were frozen. The best part of the race was the noise, a low rumble that shot from one ear to the other like a stereo. The bobs were very shiny. We stayed for one heat. It was just too cold. We got back in the ovovia and went up the mountain again. The air was so charged with misty snow we couldn’t even see the car ahead of us.
This was how I met Nicola. He got in our gondola at the top of the mountain.
THE GROUND FELL away. We slid among the evergreen steeples, and the snow shushed against the rounded windows. I scanned the rubber seal around the doors. The ride back was going to take so long, and there was no way to exit. I felt the first twinklings of panic. I didn’t know how to adjust to the intrusion of this boy into our space. The height would have been manageable if he weren’t there. I clenched and unclenched my numb toes.
He’s (she found the word I didn’t know) a nobleman. She whispered it to me, while he watched, smiling. È nobile. He was a bit older than us. Nineteen. His coat was all the way buttoned up.
The snow brought the sunset close; it was in the frost on the window and in the hazy trough of mist between our descending gondola and the ascending gondola across the way. No conductor visible anywhere. We were caught in a scheme of disembodied, geometric power. Like solar system or vortex street. Carried along by hidden power with hidden motives.
Federica and I sat on the bench on one side, and he sat on the other side. He had an intelligent face, baroque, used beauty. There was something examined about his face, adored. I had the sense lots of people looked at him. It was an agile, active face, or it was carrion, picked over, it seemed to me, even in those first moments. The face showed that everyone wanted to know what he thought all the time. He had smoking green eyes.
“Ciao, Fede,” he said. She later explained she’d met him at a few parties. He was famous around Turin and good with names.
“Ciao, Nicola,” she shot back, with a note of contention in her voice.
Down we floated in our white globe, glass circle in the white world. The gondola was even farther from the trees; we’d drifted over a crevasse. The poles holding the wires were as tall as skyscrapers. We rocked back and forth as we parted the snow. The sun was bristly between the flakes. I was worried I was having trouble breathing; my heart was beating arrhythmically. I watched her for clues about how to behave. I reached for her hand. He smiled at that; he kept his eyes on my hand when he said, in Italian, “And your friend, who’s she?”
I was terrified of him and what he might see about me and Federica. He could tell I depended on her. I tried to tell myself, Don’t worry, he can’t look into your mind. I didn’t know whether he was good—responsible, sincere. I later learned that many people found him arrogant, he was so knowing. Federica took my hand off hers. I wanted to grab it back, but I was afraid I’d fall apart if she refused me. My shame ricocheted within me, getting stronger. My ears rang, and hot queasiness squeezed at me from the inside. Meantime, the gondola went falling at increasing speed through the air. I was worried I would throw up. I couldn’t breathe. I put my hand under my coat and pinched my waist trying to ground myself, but my body was disobedient. Stop it, stop it, I either thought or said; I was rocking and grimacing, and I had to do whatever was necessary to stay alive. Silence rolled over me, my pulse was overflowing and escaping. My heart hastily counted down. I was aware that I could keep breathing, but my heart was going to stop and there was nothing I could do about that. Could I do my own chest compressions? We were so far from a hospital. I never found out how Federica answered “Who’s she?”
“Are you afraid of heights?” he said. His voice was far off. He spoke to me in English with a formal, old-fashioned American accent. I couldn’t lift my head. “We’ll be down soon.” It was like hearing a painting speak.
He stood, crossed the flying space in one step, and knelt in front of me. He put his leather-gloved hand on my shoulder and neck. His touch was a shock. In the black midst of my panic, it thrilled me. No one had ever touched me there or in that manner.
I tilted my head back against the window and felt the cold glass. I was pinned there against the window by his tense hand while the pink atmosphere continued, in slow motion, to shatter all around us.
Fede didn’t like that. “She’s being silly,” she said, in Italian. Fede didn’t want me to have the attentiveness and gentleness from the nobleman.
I wondered if he could feel my whipping heart. I couldn’t look at his face, so I just looked at the dark curls on his temple. I’d dreamed of being saved, but I’d never felt it. He was part of it, the dawn on the Po and the long purple cypress shadows, the scent of the evergreen boughs broken by snow, the exaltation—and now I felt something so consuming I was worthy of it—that fine cold glove, that knowing compress on my neck. An ultraviolet feeling.
The gondola was a shuddering fantasyland, the sun emerged, and the snow was an endless cascade of gems. He looked out from the window of this little flying room into the winter room of next year, the year after that. He swapped my panic for wonder.
What is the purpose of art? To classify certain things as types of things, my high school art teacher said. To classify certain things as types of things.
In a certain sense that day stood still forever. No day ever passed since then. Some mornings I woke up in midair in the snow, kissing the air that fluttered out of Nicola’s mouth.
Reprinted with permission from THE ABSOLUTES: A NOVEL by Molly Dektar (Mariner, an imprint of HarperCollins Publisher, July 2023).
