To me this book is about reflections and repetitions, the motif of the twins experiencing realities from the same cellular foundations. 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. The same yet not, each putting a claim on reality from an alternative vantage point. 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.

It is also about connection and how we reach for it. The ties that bind us are fragile things, in need of constant nurturing and reassessment. Here those links are played out under the hyperreal conditions of a war. All war is madness, we know this, the arbitrary nature of fates lived out in their most apparent representations. There is a kind of surreality to living life when atrocities are before us. These acts of violence spring out of nothing, of silence, of people having banal conversations. 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. This book takes those familiar narratives and stretches them to be inclusive of the melancholy of chaos. 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.

There is a poignant longing that runs throughout this story. A country haunted by conflict and characters struggling with understandable failings. 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.

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 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.

Another facet of this novel is the oil that runs through its veins. 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. Look around you now and consider how much of your crap contains NO trace of its insidious influence. Oil is one of the main foundations of our reality, whether by necessity for our current living standards or by the underhand influence of those invested in it, or any interest that rests on some level of the spectrum between the two. Start thinking about the dominance of the substance in relation to wider concerns like the economy, the environment, government policy and trade and your head can literally explode, #Scanners. Here the novel takes the theme and moves towards a logical conclusion, at once knowing and chilling.

I loved this book, as it contains lots of subjects I think endlessly about all mashed together in a humane and skillful way. From the exploration of the relevance of the quantum world to the simple story of brotherhood, from the transportation to a country I was unfamiliar with to the wonderful evocative descriptions of the mythological world, I was pretty enraptured by this. ( )

Findesferas is an ambitious debut. It's set in a nearly fuel-less future Paraguay, where a war rages on, much in the hands of a possibly insane marshal, (and a war that we can probably all see isn't necessarily too much of a fictitious prediction) and yet the war and the state of the world that caused it means the Paraguay we find is much more the one of early times, with simple life in settlements and thoughts of family and survival. And so it is, that we soon find the war is just a backdrop to the story of the twins Matias and Juan; this is their story, and it's one that could be put to most any backdrop. But it's in Octavia's world where we find a story even older, as she's visited by the Guarani spirit the Pombero, and mortal deals are made on the edge of the ethereal. Then, alongside that, put in plenty of factual references from Guarani culture and language, to the properties of quicksand, to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and insert a few chapters of being on the spaceship The Findesferas, leaving the war in Paraguay behind, as mankind reaches to the stars, and you have a great story from one era to another, encapsulating the timelessness of humanity.

It took me a little while to fully feel like I was in this book, but then the different facets of this tale clicked together, and by the time of approaching the end, and seeing where that was going, it somehow wrapped up the rest of the story in perfect poignancy.
An ambitious book very nearly pulled off. In my opinion, some tightening was needed, some more drastic editing and a slight sprucing up of structure, but the one thing that made this such an enjoyable read was simply the author's descriptive prose. He has a wonderful way of describing things, from action scenes to mundane objects. There's a poetic beauty to Robertson's writing. It felt like I wouldn't have cared whether I was reading about a dystopian South America or a story about a lost shoe, because the author would be capable of finding the exact right words to use in each case. ( )