I high-scorer; I do like these 'network narratives' so if you like films like (LA) Crash and Magnolia, this'll be just for you.

There were times I forgot exactly who certain characters were and had to go back and check - but this may also have been down to my not having read the book straight through (i.e. a day or two without reading.)

Quite possibly (no, definitely probably) my favorite novel of all time. As much as I'm a fan of Alex Garland's movies, this book shows a side of his talent that surpasses those. Three seemingly separate stories that culminate into an ending that makes you grip the two covers and realize what it means to be a person living in this crazy world we call reality. It's great. It's really great.

Pretty ingenious writing. The way it’s set up gives multiple climaxes; and the final climax is incredible thanks to all the buildup. Pretty ~Pulp Fiction~ in the way the individual stories are told. The way they interact though is way beyond. That final description of a tesseract really tied it together too.
Garland’s narration is also fucking god-tier. He embodies each character so well by almost just following their streams of consciousness. There’s an existentialism embedded in the characters without ever needing to voice it.
The only negative is that the buildup to the finale did at times feel arduous; but only because it was tough jumping blind into new characters after just getting comfy with the ones prior.

This is an interesting story. It starts off slowly. He gives you three separate tales but they all tie in together at the end. I almost abandoned the reading but didn't! I am glad . It was worth the time.

At the end of this jumbled narrative, I felt aligned with Vincente, a Filipino street urchin lying on the pavement after witnessing an incomprehensible sequence of violent events:

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

A high-level distillation of those events involves roughly three story lines.

In the first, a young British guy in Manilla waits in the seedy ruin of a hotel for a meeting with an underworld character known as Don Pepe. Flashbacks reveal that Sean seems to have taken over from his former boss in a sketchy shipping enterprise, that boss perhaps having departed the scene in an inglorious manner, and that Don Pepe is the last in a line of heartless villains. The tension builds, Don Pepe arrives with three henchmen, there is shooting (a lot of it), after which Sean finds himself running through dark streets with henchmen in hot pursuit. In his panic, he barely registers the presence of "two street kids, watching him with startled and serious faces."

The only suggestion that part two might belong in the same narrative is that each begins with a passing reference to the bright colors outdoors. Aside from that, the transition is more than jarring. It's to a domestic scene involving a woman named Rosa, her two children, and her mother, winding down at the conclusion of a normal day. More flashbacks convey information about Rosa's younger days in a rural part of the Philippines and her first lover, who seems to have been the father of her older child. Her husband Sonny, meanwhile, is trying to drive home from work but is delayed by a flat tire caused when kids throw nails in front of his car. Therefore, he misses the climax of Sean's desperate flight, which occurs in his kitchen.

In the third part, the only color is on an oil slick. Now the focus is on those two homeless kids, Vincente and Tetoy, whose lives are largely taken up with fantasy or, perhaps, fantastic interpretations of the gritty world around them. For example, they put nails in front of Sonny's car because they're pretending it's an enemy tank.

Loose ends notwithstanding, I suppose it hangs together, in the same way movies like Babel and Pulp Fiction and Crash hang together. In terms of literature, it reminded me of the more ambitious (and more successful) Let the Great World Spin (which I commented on here). However, unlike that mighty endeavor, it does not hint at a constructive broader statement. All these lives do indeed connect, in a sense, but not in a way suggesting unity or progression toward improvement. To the extent that their thought processes are made accessible, even the killers (aside from Don Pepe) seem almost like regular people (assuming you can tolerate what happens to the cat). That's nice, but if all this leads to is death and confusion, it seems to be a waste of the author's talent.

I write this with awareness that arguably lots of the books I read have a nihilist or depressing effect. Maybe sometimes I'm more receptive to it than I was here. I did like n  The Beach.n

As every horror-movie survivor knows, it's not the attack that's so frightening. It's the moment before the attack.

In Alex Garland's new novel, "The Tesseract," the monsters are entirely human, but the tension is out of this world.

Garland is a wizard of time manipulation. His entire novel transpires while some Filipino thugs burst into a hotel room, chase a man down the street, and shoot him. It's the closest you'll ever come to riding a bullet.

But there's nothing linear about this shocking, complex story, told in three parts. What's remarkable about "The Tesseract" is the way it traces the people and events that converge in the center of this deadly web.

The novel opens as a ship captain awaits the arrival of his assassins in a deserted part of Manila. He has a terrifyingly clear vision of what's about to happen; the same gangsters murdered his predecessor several years earlier.

In the dead silence he endures, even the cockroaches make too much noise. There's nothing to do but watch the light fade, speculate about a stain on the floor, and prepare a futile defense.

As the narration fractures and rotates, the murderers driving toward him come into focus. Their boss, Don Pepe, comes from a line of hideously cruel plantation masters, but one of his young henchman struggles to develop the requisite brutality in the face of his own inexplicable tenderness.

The novel shifts abruptly to a wealthy suburb outside the city, where a doctor puts her young children to bed. The contrast suggests that the difference between a quiet peaceful evening and the chilly sweat of dread is only a matter of perspective.

In so many ways, this woman's comfortable suburban life couldn't be further from the chaos raining down in town, but as the past seeps into her thoughts, we see the burn marks of violence in her own life, too.

The third section of the novel traces the erratic paths of two street kids, baffled by their predicament and struggling to survive. Reeling from his wife's suicide, an idealistic psychologist has dedicated his life to helping these children by analyzing their dreams, but the night visions and the day realities are hard to disentangle.

On three different axes, these characters race toward a violent collision that we can't help anticipating with a wince.

"Some things are too complicated to be easily expressed," the narrator notes, but fortunately, the complexity here is fascinating rather than baffling.

In our everyday, three-dimensional world, these characters are like the sides of a tesseract. They should never be able to meet; it's an unimaginable violation of our perspective.

This is a novel based on the physics of disaster. Garland follows a bullet through a door as effectively as he traces a neutrino through a block of lead. With so much empty space between the basic elements of matter, Garland suggests that it's remarkable we ever make contact, but not surprising that the results are violent when we do.

As Garland moves back and forth through the places and times that created this tragic convergence, he knows how to convey a character's background with a precise detail in the foreground. "The Tesseract" confirms all the praise poured on this English writer's first novel, "The Beach" (1996).

Garland is a master at capturing that elastic moment before tragedy rips through the surface of ordinary life. Even in moments of explosion, he catches every contradictory thought of terror and compassion. This is a dangerously hot novel.

http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0204/p2...

One of my all time favorite books.

Part I is brilliant. The second part is quite good as well but I found the third part less so, and the denouement disappointing.
A fine writer though, one I'd not read before.

Good fast moving book to get u out of a reading slump

I don't think this was for me. I like the idea of the three stories coming together but I don't think some of the characters were developed enough for this style. There were some unsatisfactory endings and as I'm still really confused by what happened to the baby at the funeral and Lito's part in this (or not, which is probably why I'm confused!) his final section was totally baffling!

4★彡
Poor cat ฅ(=ዎܫዎ=)∫

【plot】 A shoot-out at a dingy Manila hotel sets off a chain reaction of events, intertwining the lives of multiple strangers in the course of a day. 【details】 Ermita, Manila; contemporary, 1998 --- multiple third-person limited pov; nonlinear narrative; converging storylines; medium-paced.

title drop: Take six cubes and arrange them into the shape of a crucifix. Take two more cubes and stick them on either side of the crucifix, at the point where the cross is made. Now you have a tesseract. A tesseract is a three-dimensional object. A tesseract is also a four-dimensional object—a hypercube—unraveled.

•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••
➟Quite obviously written by a visiting foreigner and geared toward Western readers. There are discordant cultural references here that wouldn't ruffle the target audience, but can't sneak past a Pinoy with nary a comment. I don't like to nitpick (and overall, I like this book), but I'm writing them down to remember them.

First off, no one in their right mind would name a hotel "Hotel Patay." That's every much as jarring and in-your-face as "Death Hotel" or "Hotel Cadaver." It's bad for business—unless it's a Halloween theme park (＾∀＾). It's the kind of linguistic detail that will make a foreigner go, "Patay means death! That's so... symbolic and deep," but is nonsensical in reality. There's also a "Sayang Avenue" and a "Sugat Drive." I don't see these names passing any sort of litmus test, as Filipinos are an extremely superstitious bunch, lol.

Alex Garland did an excellent job selecting generic Filipino nicknames such as Jojo, Bubot, Totoy, Sonny, and even the mestizo crime boss Don Pepe. But then he misreckons "Pepe" as a surname, calling Don Pepe's family "the Pepes," which is peculiar and obviously a mistake (Don Pepe's character is A.G.'s invention, but I dare say it, a mistake). One time, Jojo also refers to Don Pepe as "Mang Don Pepe," which is not only a double honorific but cancel each other out. If Don Pepe cut off his overseer's hands for dirtying his cream silk trousers, then I can imagine he would cut off the tongue of an impudent underling who dared address him as "Mang."

Noticed many other misguided portrayals here, such as a man wearing a barong tagalog at a McDonald's kid's party (˃̣̣̥ w ˂̣̣̥) and how a strong typhoon seemed to last four days without losing strength in a little barrio. But truly I can ignore all these nitpicky blunders; if this story was set in another "exotic" place, like Vietnam or Thailand, I probably wouldn't have noticed or minded these deets anyway.

I don't begrudge Alex Garland's observations of the slums of Manila. I suppose these are details that would impress a foreigner—security guards with shotguns, roaches in rundown motels, the gridlock traffic. But there were some truly acute, eloquent observations here, especially of sunsets, jeepneys, and the street urchins (mannerisms and all). 

On the whole, it's a complex and multilayered thriller with compelling characters and high-quality writing, and almost too literary for its own good. Alex Garland has been praised by the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michiko Kakutani, etc., which is all the praise he needs and his aegis from the criticisms of us plebs. The scene with the cat was especially tough to read. The concept is grand of scale and ambition—the labyrinth of human connections, of chance encounters and individual choices, and how they fold and intersect in unexpected ways. The way the story ties together in the end is climactic.

I have just finished this book this morning and I, like many others, picked up this book after thoroughly enjoying his previous novel The Beach. When starting The Tesseract, you can clearly feel the similarities between this book and his previous but The Tesseract quickly becomes its own story. The book follows several different characters and jumps around within the timeline. It starts with Sean in a `roach infested hotel' as he awaits the arrival of local gangster Don Pepe. Next we have a Filipino family living out in the suburbs in Manila and finally we have some street kids living their lives in a rough environment. At first, these situations all seem completely unrelated but the links become clear towards the end of the book. I did enjoy this read but you can't help but compare it to his previous novel which had such success.