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Tesserect (Hardcover)

by Alex Garland (Author)

3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (134 customer reviews)

Price:	CDN$ 34.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
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Product Details

Hardcover: 273 pages
Publisher: Riverhead (HC) (Jan 1 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1573221090
ISBN-13: 978-1573221092
Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 3.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 477 g

Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (134 customer reviews)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #1,085,014 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

From Amazon.com

In The Tesseract, set in muggy, scary Manila, Alex Garland again proves himself the past master of the youth paranoia novel. His first novel, The Beach--a tale of Western tourists on a druggy Thai isle--was dubbed a Gen-X Lord of the Flies. It made him Britain's richest 28-year-old writer even before Leonardo DiCaprio starred in the movie version. Now Garland ups the literary ante with an intricate three-part crime-story structure that several critics have compared to Pulp Fiction (only without the jokes). It's hard-boiled yet lyrical, subtle yet simple. Garland has three sets of characters collide, as if in a devilishly devised model-train wreck involving real trains, and his Manila is more grittily realistic than his Thailand. The first protagonist is Sean, an English seafaring lad who's about to meet the gangster Don Pepe, who's upset because Sean's boss recently missed a protection payment. It's not just the tarmac-melting heat that accounts for Sean's sweaty state of mind. As Don Pepe's posse's footsteps get louder outside his room, Sean glimpses his face in the mirror "in a state of flux. Unable to resolve itself, like a cheap hologram or a bucket of snakes, the lips curled while the jaw relaxed.... Fear, Sean thought distantly. Rare that one got to see what it actually looked like." Garland's great gift is conveying such mental states with the economy and grace of a Muhammad Ali punch. One feels that Don Pepe is about to reach up from the book and do violence to the reader.

Next comes the entire, tensely compressed life story of Rosa, a rural beach beauty turned big-city physician. Rosa is tormented by memories of her first love at 16, a man who comes crashing back into her life. In the last section, Sean and Don Pepe's thugs literally crash into her life, along with the book's third star duo, tough street kids Cente and Totoy. The Tesseract's vivid images and breakneck chases make it unsurprising to learn that Garland started out as a comic-book author, though his second novel really bears comparison with Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly

The tesseract of Garland's title refers to the reduction of a four-dimensional cube to a three-dimensional one: "We can see the thing unraveled, but not the thing itself." In an attempt at similar dimensionality, Garland (The Beach) has written a novel that operates on two levels. His characters intersect in a metaphysical web and also in a violent series of coincidences. A sailor named Sean waits to rendezvous with a crime boss named Don Pepe in a seedy hotel in Manila. Sean kills Don Pepe in ambush, but the dead man's henchmen chase Sean through the streets of Manila. This is action-movie stuff, but the story soon moves through a whole new cast of characters. Sean runs past two street boys and ends up cornered in a family's home in an upper-class neighborhood. Garland now takes up these secondary characters and tells their stories, deconstructing the exoticism of his premise. We read of a woman named Rosa's romantic history and her father's death; and we learn of the street waifs' desperate lives. The boys sell their dreams to a psychologist named Alfredo, who is writing a thesis about the unconscious lives of Filipino street kids. Although Garland's allusions to super-symmetry and tesseracts are far-fetched, the reader will come away impressed by his sense of place and his unique storytelling, which combines a brisk, complex plot with an ability to get into the souls and skins of people. BOMC and QPB alternate; author tour. (Feb.) FYI: Leonardo DiCaprio will star in the movie version of The Beach.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

134 Reviews

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(20)

Average Customer Review

3.5 out of 5 stars (134 customer reviews)

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Most helpful customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Liked 28 Days Later? You'll like this too., Jul 17 2004

By	Randall Neustaedter (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Tesseract A Novel (Paperback)

Alien landscapes that seem all too familiar, person devastation, and random violent acts. Those are the stock-in-trade ingredients of Alex Garland in this novel and in his accomplished screenplay for 28 Days Later. His characters roam through these stark scenes, just able to survive amid the most inhuman acts of destruction. Whether it's science fiction or the grimy back streets of poverty stricken cities, the pull of his stories is magnetic and inevitable. Garland hanles his innocents of the world and his hardened villains with equal aplomb. The reader is taken, the viewer is fascinated, and all in a deft, sophisticated style. Garland is grim, but beneath the gritty survival story lies a potent and hopeful humanity. Better that The Beach, a complex and intertwined story awaits you in The Tesseract.

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5.0 out of 5 stars I don't read many books but this was quite enjoyable, Mar 24 2004

By	John P. Thompson (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Tesseract A Novel (Paperback)

I've been obsessed with the movie The Beach. Every time I watch it, it climbs my favorite movie ladder(which it is now in the top 10). So I decided to (gasp) read the book The Beach to see what all was different from the movie. Sadly my library only had The Tesseract by Alex Garland, so no Beach for me. While I don't read many books, The Tesseract held my attention and was a fun read.

The book is simply brilliant, as others have said. This is what I got out of the book: It tackles the issue of time or the 4th dimension something that we as 3 dimensional beings can never really see happening nor control. Whether it be someone who has gotten themself into a bad situation, someone who has loved, or someone who has forgotten the past, time is what none of these people could predict. Much like they could not predict how they would end up spending time together themselves.

What we end up with is a group of 3-dimensional people who are haunted by time. And by doing so only look at the next step up, the 4th dimension, but never understanding it as a whole. And with this comes a sense of godlessness that if humans are struggling to comprehend what's behind time, how could they ever comprehend god or some higher dimension in life or the hereafter?

The end result is a group of people who at most can only comprehend their view of actions that take place, who never have the full story, who can only make their daily lives less complex but never more. A book through 3 different stories that shows the limits of humanity. Everyone should read The Tesseract.

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5.0 out of 5 stars 4 dimensional - incredible, Dec 26 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Tesseract A Novel (Paperback)

This book will inspire the unthinking to think and the unfeeling to feel. An amazingly deep story - tied together in ways you cant even imagine in 3-d.

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Most recent customer reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars This book was a disappointment
I liked the movie "The Beach," but reading "The Tesseract" made me not want to finish the book ("The Beach"). Read more

Published on Dec 14 2003 by James A Bretney

1.0 out of 5 stars EASY to put down, NOT spellingbinding like The Beach
I loved The Beach, Alex Garland's first book. The movie was ok ,however it is the writer's voice in this book that is so unique. Read more

Published on Sep 24 2003 by Ms Book

4.0 out of 5 stars A Terse Act
"The Tesseract" provides a beautiful description of a series of ugly circumstances. Here we have life and death; disfigurement; cruelty; jealousy and sadness;... Read more

Published on Aug 15 2003 by Samantha Madell

4.0 out of 5 stars professional writing
a very clean piece of writing. The Tesseract is really three (long) short stories connected by location and certain events which characters from each of the stories participate... Read more

Published on Jul 29 2003 by I. J. Mclachlan