This book has the honor of being one of the strangest and impossible to summarize that I have ever read. Jurgen, a dissatisfied, middle-aged pawnbroker in the land of Poictesme with a rather difficult wife, loses his wife one day. She doesn't die; she is just lost. He goes in search of her, but in the process is granted a year in which to relive his youth. He wanders the mythological realms, taking up with Guenevere, the Lady of the Lake, a wood dryad in the realm of Queen Helen, and with several other women besides. He even takes a tour through both heaven and hell, finding them quite hilariously otherwise than one would have supposed, until he finally meets Koshchei the Deathless, he who made all that was, is, or shall be, who sets everything back to where it was before he even started.

That's just the bald framework of the matter. The book is a hilarious--if glibly misogynistic-- meditation on being a middle-aged man. At times it is comically perverse--the book was the subject of an actual obscenity trial after its publication, due to its several erudite but veiled dick jokes.

Fans of Neil Gaiman may recall that Cabell gets mentioned multiple times in his Sandman series. It was interesting to note that the influence of Cabell on that series is quite real. The version of Hell Gaiman presents us with in Season of Mists owes a great deal to the Hell of Jurgen's journeys, so much so that Lucifer, in that book, has speeches that almost directly quote this one. It's interesting to see an author's influences at work like that.