Look around you now and consider how much of your crap contains NO trace of its insidious influence. No substance occupies the vital contemporary world as this one does, from every angle of life it wades in like a big gooey tar baby, throwing its weight around, demanding it be sated, present in the most unexpected places.

The struggle to make our own sense of what constitutes our subjective viewpoint is enough in itself, the fact we try to extend this to others an endlessly unfathomable type of miracle.Īnother facet of this novel is the oil that runs through its veins.

The references to the reducing of things to their simpler elements is a smart illustration of how reality spins up from its mysterious component parts and we are limited in our capacity to comprehend even what we can, what is right before us. The feeling of the transcendent aspects of loss when set against the spread of time before us combines with the importance of the present moment and creates a moving and appreciative acknowledgement of the difficulties and strangeness of being human. A country haunted by conflict and characters struggling with understandable failings. There is a poignant longing that runs throughout this story. Here the world of the ethereal gathers its resources to infiltrate the consciousnesses of the central characters and spirits whisper in their ears and appear in front of their eyes, as an affront to the natural laws that objective reality adheres to.

This book takes those familiar narratives and stretches them to be inclusive of the melancholy of chaos. This is where our stories can fail us if we let them, the myths and folktales that have evolved to contain our dreams and nightmares seem to abandon us in these times, unfairly dismissed as bedtime stories to be put away with childish things. These acts of violence spring out of nothing, of silence, of people having banal conversations. There is a kind of surreality to living life when atrocities are before us. All war is madness, we know this, the arbitrary nature of fates lived out in their most apparent representations. Here those links are played out under the hyperreal conditions of a war. The ties that bind us are fragile things, in need of constant nurturing and reassessment.

It is also about connection and how we reach for it. It is not stated if the twins, Juan and Matias, are identical or fraternal but to me it would make sense that their origin would be to have split from one zygote into two separate embryos, as the theme of mirroring yet infinitely divergent representations of time and space permeate this novel. The same yet not, each putting a claim on reality from an alternative vantage point. A strange destiny initiated in the division of the whole, a fork in the road that splinters off into two different directions instead of one. To me this book is about reflections and repetitions, the motif of the twins experiencing realities from the same cellular foundations.

Findesferas by Leo X. Robertson