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vmayne's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
erincataldi's review
2.0
I have no idea what I just read. There is surrealism, madness, mystery, and adventure and the reader must decide what is real and what is not. A retired police inspector takes on a missing person case and decides that he must become Carlos in order to find him. When that doesn't work the inspector decides that Carlos must have escaped into the jungle and then goes deeper and deeper into his inner psyche and the jungle. It's beautiful and lush but hard to follow. Their are theories, what ifs, spiraling threads, and insanity. I could never discuss this or analyze it. It's far too off the war. For fans of surrealism and literary fiction.
alexrafinski's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
3.0
The words weird, complex and surreal spring to mind when trying to work out how to describe this book. I've got to be honest - I didn't really have a clue what was going on, and was quite glad when it was over. Ascension by the same author is a much better book in my opinion.
jamesdavid's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.0
caterinaanna's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
nightfold's review against another edition
4.0
This book single-handedly invents the genre of Borgesian corporate horror
masonanddixon's review against another edition
3.75
Among the first books I've seen to bear Tom McCarthy's influence in its fractalized surreal vignettes of the absurd, Infinite Ground is a slippery, postmodern mystery that is less about a missing person than about the idea of the word 'missing'. When the even the particular contains the infinite what good is attention, what power is story telling in the infinite of space, and the infinite of the molecular, the atomic, the viral? More a pleasure to think about than to read, but MacInnes may have a convert on his hands should his later, more broadly acclaimed, novels mend that gap.
_ciaran's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
emilycarney's review against another edition
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
I REALLY enjoyed this. Weird in a way that is still very tangible in the first half so you’ve got a decent grip of it when it starts becoming more abstract and tangled.
Had a gut instinct about what the ending meant, but the more I think about it the more options there are. My immediate thought was that he wouldn’t be accepted into any new community and would probably be killed even if it did exist and wasn’t some crazed hallucination. So much of this book is him really struggling to integrate into different settings comfortably. But then the idea that he would, that it’s where all of the missing people are and that it’s full of people who just had to escape their lives is probably a happier ending, in a way, and I don’t think it’s impossible to interpret it that way either - or as a big old metaphor for him processing his grief and getting eaten by bugs along the way but now he gets to swim in the sea and not go to work, etc etc. I wonder what that says about me, but I’m not sure I want to know.
Had a gut instinct about what the ending meant, but the more I think about it the more options there are.