Ganske uforståelig i starten, men det kan ha vært fordi jeg ikke fulgte godt nok med. Skifter ofte point of view, og det er sånn i utgangspunktet ikke helt min greie, menmen. Det skjer ikke så mye gjennom boka, bare masse tilbakeblikk på ting som har skjedd tidligere. Det gjør at man av og til mister litt tidslinja. Slutten gjør, i min mening, på en måte opp for hele resten av boka. Det er det sjuke ting som skjer og en eksplosjon av karakter og kryssinger av plot lines. Det er som når du skjønner hvordan alt henger sammen, og hvorfor ting skjer på grunn av de andres handlinger.

Set in the Philippines, The Tesseract pretends to be some action thriller novel that takes the reader through the lives of various people. It was a largely forgetful book. The protagonist, I think his name was Simon (see? I can't even remember) was bland. Every other character was bland too. Thankfully the Philippines was given some life in this book. Garland nicely described the scenery here, and he doesn't sugar coat it as to make it sound ridiculous.

The plot was really dumb. The climax wasn't especially climactic. The drama not dramatic. Some of the action was pointless and it sometimes made me wonder "What the hell were you on when you wrote this, guy?" I didn't get how the stories came together.

I did enjoy the scenes at Hotel Patay. Those were rather suspenseful and expertly told. But everything went downhill from there.

And yes. The Hotel is named Hotel Patay. Just goes to show how much thought went into this novel, because Patay is the Filipino word for DEAD. WHAT KIND OF PHILIPPINE HOTEL WOULD BE NAMED HOTEL DEAD!?

Yes I know this review sucks.

I read "The Beach" quite a few years ago and liked it very much. I mostly forgot about Alex Garland for a while until I stumbled across this one and thought I'd give it a try.

It's a very well written book, done up in three main arcs: a young British traveller, a wife and mother in suburban Manilla and a young boy living on the streets. It's peppered with other characters, but these are your three main ones. Each has their story told, and each of their stories all intersect in a well thought out way.

The main metaphor of this book is the shape of a tesseract, which is a hypercube unravelled. Garland's statement is that you can see the tesseract, but can't see the hypercube after it's been unravelled. You can see the parts when they're spread out, but not what the whole is. It's a great metaphor for this book, and if you approach it with this in mind, you'll not be too jarred by the jumps from story to story.

Great read, and I'm looking forward to picking up some more of Mr. Garland's books.

Extremely well-written, always a fan of Garland's dialogue, but something just didn't click for me. I feel like if you're going to write a story with multiple different strands that all link together to make a larger narrative point then each segment has to pull its own weight but a lot of this, even at a relatively easy-to-read 200ish pages, came across as meandering and towards the final act, annoyingly pretentious. Wish this app allowed half stars.

...wow.

I understand some of the negative reviews, but this is not a conventional novel. It masterfully and enigmatically darts through time, and from beginning to end the main arc takes no time at all, but the novel spans several generations in flashback. I have not often been so impressed by the mere structure of a novel. It is periodically confusing, but each confusion is given a payoff either literal or existential. An incredibly intelligent book, whose plot is ultimately about the lack of plot: the way isolated sequences of events can link, and have long reaching ramifications, but whose meanings can never be understood by the participants within, due to the limits of our own perspectives.

After reading "The Beach" and "Coma" and moderately enjoying those books, I decided to finish off the Alex Garland "trilogy" of novels. Unfortunately, I found this to be the weakest of the three.

For a very basic overview, "The Tesseract" tells a three-pronged story set in or around Manila. In short: an English tourist sees a mafia deal go bad on him--a woman reflects upon a man she once loved--and two street urchins are psychoanalyzed by a professor looking to write his research masterpiece. All angles converge in the book's final pages.

Despite "The Tesseract" being pretty readable in terms of language and form, I found two major stumbling blocks within it:

#1--I only truly enjoyed one of the three stories--Rosa. The rest were as vague and open-ended as they were supposed to be emotional.

#2--The "big finale" ending was more of a fizzle for me. Yes, the tales interact, but it was utterly lost on me why this was a meaningful event. Perhaps I missed something in either plot or context--or perhaps it was just a stretch.

Either way, despite the middle sections where I found the pages to turn with frequency, I finished this novel extremely disappointed. Whereas "The Beach" at least gave me a journey and "Coma" provided some interesting philosophical musings, I just didn't know what to take away from "The Tesseract".

"A hypercube is a thing you are not equipped to understand. You can only understand the tesseract. This means something. For you and for me, Cente, this is the way it is. We can see the thing unravelled, but not the thing itself."

Quite different from The Beach but it shows an inkling of Garlands later flair for movie plots. An enjoyable novel about time and fate.

I've liked every Alex Garland novel except this one unfortunately.

I wasn't too invested into any of the characters and the writing style seemed less refined.

Kind of a good idea though, but it didn't resonate for me at all although I did find it more interesting in the last 3rd (although the conclusion reverted back to what I didn't like in the first 2/3rds of the book).

I'd head to The Beach instead!

It starts well and then meanders into other stories that link up at the end. Sort of like Love Actually but a bit more gruesome and pointless. There's some deeper meaning behind the three story threads all matching up together at the end but I wasn't really enthused to try and read the deeper meaning. It was a book I was quite happy to get to the end of so I didn't have to read any more of it.

"Maybe there is nothing here I am meant to understand.
Maybe there is no meant to understand.
This means something."

An Englishman on the run from gangsters; a woman recounting her first love; two street kids who sell their dreams to a psychiatrist. There is no clear definition for this book. Part thriller, part love story, part social commentary. Garland is most well-known for writing suspenseful, thought-provoking films (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Ex Machina), but before this he was writing suspenseful, thought-provoking novels. Each narrative within this book is its own self-contained world, filled as it is with pathos and emotion. This book could easily have been expanded to three times its length, the stories built up even more, but Garland chose to pare them down to their essentials. Something might have been gained from penning a longer book, but I feel like Garland achieved precisely what he wanted to with this piece.

It took me 20 years to read it (if you consider that the book was edited in 1998). Alex Garland accomplishes an interesting multi-story book where all gets connected in the end. The book is overall interesting, but one is not sure "where all this is going" while you are reading it, so I was a bit disappointed since my expectations were different. Still, an entertaining read.

My view of this book is probably a little unfairly skewed as I only read this book assuming it would be similar to Alex Garland's "The Beach". I read the beach over twenty years ago and was a huge fan. I was eager for more and then Alex Garland released The Tesseract. Of course The Tesseract is nothing like the beach and that clearly influenced how I viewed this book which in hind site is unfair.
The characters and setting and style of writing were all good. The story itself was fast paced and well thought out.
I have no doubt that had I read this book before the beach or with no per-conceived expectations I would have rated this book higher.