The Infinite Tides (Audible Audio Edition) Christian Kiefer Colin Smith Audible Studios for Bloomsbury Books
Download As PDF : The Infinite Tides (Audible Audio Edition) Christian Kiefer Colin Smith Audible Studios for Bloomsbury Books
Keith Corcoran has spent his entire life preparing to be an astronaut. At the moment of his greatness, finally aboard the International Space Station, hundreds of miles above the Earth's swirling blue surface, he receives word that his 16-year-old daughter has died in a car accident, and that his wife has left him. Returning to Earth, and to his now empty suburban home, he is alone with the ghosts, the memories, and feelings he can barely acknowledge, let alone process. He is a mathematical genius, a brilliant engineer, a famous astronaut, but nothing in his life has readied him for this.
With its endless interlocking culs-de-sac, big box stores, and vast parking lots, contemporary suburbia is not a promising place to recover from such trauma. But healing begins through new relationships, never Keith's strength, first as a torrid affair with one neighbor, and then as an unlikely friendship with another, a Ukrainian immigrant who every evening lugs his battered telescope to the weed-choked vacant lot at the end of the street. Gazing up at the heavens together, drinking beer and smoking pot, the two men share their vastly different experiences and slowly reveal themselves to each other, until Keith can begin to confront his loss and begin to forgive himself for decades of only half-living.
The Infinite Tides is a deeply moving, tragicomic, and ultimately redemptive story of love, loss, and resilience. It is also an indelible and nuanced portrait of modern American life that renders both our strengths and weaknesses with great and tender beauty.
The Infinite Tides (Audible Audio Edition) Christian Kiefer Colin Smith Audible Studios for Bloomsbury Books
The Infinite Tides is about a depressed astronaut named Keith Corcoran whose daughter dies and wife leaves him, causing him to have a mental breakdown while aboard the International Space Station and forcing him to come back to Earth on indefinite leave. The book contemplates the grieving process combined with loneliness and almost boredom as Keith returns with nothing to occupy his mind but the magnitude of his loss. As a mathematical genius, he sees mathematical algorithms and equations in everything, including the sequence of events in his life that lead him to where he is now.The quality of writing is also extremely good, lending itself to an almost lyrical portrayal of what is going on. In fact, the book is, in a way, almost haunting. It deals in large part with the agony of loss, as well as the need to move forward even when there is nothing that can be done.
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The Infinite Tides (Audible Audio Edition) Christian Kiefer Colin Smith Audible Studios for Bloomsbury Books Reviews
Downloaded this novel immediately after finishing The Animals. This of course was a totally different storyline but it was another quick read where I was totally immersed in the characters. I'm sold on this author.
I really liked this book but the ending was flat and disappointing. I liked Kiefer's non-emotional style, conveying actually a lot of emotion. I am surprised this book hasn't received more critical attention. I for one would like to read more of his stuff!
The prose style was beautiful and engaging - simple yet rich. The story had an existential quality as it followed the life of a man whose life was devastated at its happiest moment. Eventually, he settled into something deeply satisfying. It was an unusual treat to read such a good book about the emotional life of a man with whom many ordinary men could identify even if we never were astronauts.
I read this book while travelling. It was perfect for that. Set up with a lot of short-ish chapters, so it was easy to keep stopping and starting as I changed actvities. Reasonably compelling story, to help distract me from flight delays and the ever-present loud person sitting behind me on the plane. The book seemed to be well-researched, so there was a lot of interesting factual information about the space program to go along with the story.
This is a great novel, I have read it multiple times and it never gets old. I work in a library and surrounded by a great deal of awesome books every now and then I find myself coming back to this one. Kiefer does a great job with not only the characters but the addition of detail into the space aspect. This novel is now being passed around to my coworkers who are liking the novel as much as I do. This novel won't be on your shelf for long periods of time... it will be carried around with you on a constant! Looking forward to Kiefers next book coming out in march, what's better than his next book? his next book comes with a soundtrack, Kiefer also happens to be a good musician so there is an even better deal.
In this novel, Kiefer has created a moving story about a mathematical genius, Keith Corcoran, who manages to fulfill his life mission of being an astronaut. The only problem is that when his teenaged daughter dies in a car accident while he's on an international space station, and his wife leaves him, he is left to deal with the consequences of the isolation he always sought out. Keith is a fascinating character. He feels more connected to numbers - which he sees in colors and treats as if they have their own corporeal existence - than he does to people. He discovered early on that his daughter shares his gift, but when she becomes more interested in a regular life - dating boys and participating in cheerleading - he's disappointed with her.
After her death, he has to come back to earth and deal with his regret that his monomaniacal pursuit of his career goals took him away from his family for so many long stretches that he lost all connection to them . The house he moves back into - completely emptied of all furnishings when his wife left him with the request that he sell it - becomes a metaphor for just how empty and hollowed out his life has become. As sad as all this sounds, it's not a depressing book to read because Kiefer does a good job of getting inside Keith's head and showing how he perceives the world.
Be prepared when you read this, however, that there is a lot of lyrical writing, with very abstract language, that conveys Keith's mode of thinking. The first 40 pages alone are full of that language - as we get long descriptions of the best moment of Keith life's - when he's on a spacewalk outside the space station, installing a robotic arm that he, as an engineer, designed. It's moving and poetic - but it also takes a long while to get the main gist of the story - dealing with the aftermath of his daughter's death.
While I liked the novel very much, that was my one quibble with it - that it went down some tangential paths that aren't as compelling as the ones that flesh out the main premise of the book. I don't think it's fair to quarrel with how a writer chooses to fill out a story (but of course I will anyway) but in this case I was disappointed that he didn't deliver more background details about Keith's relationship with his daughter and his wife, and what his feelings might have been while he was locked up in the space station, unable to return to earth, until 3 months after his daughter died.
We get some of that, and when we do, they are the most powerful sections of the book - particularly the flashbacks of Keith discovering, when his daughter is very young, that she has inherited his mathematical genius and then later, during her teenaged years, when he tells her how disappointed he is that she close to lead the normal life of a teenager and not do more with her gift. With his wife, there is just a brief scene about how they met and then just brief and shrill phone conversations.
What we get a instead are a few, albeit very hot and sexy, scenes from the affair he starts with the neigbhor, and then many scenes about the friendship he strucks up with a Ukrainian immigrant he meets at a Starbucks who used to work at a Russian astronomical observatory, but who since coming to America has been underemployed as a stockboy at a Target.
Ultimately, that friendship becomes an important part of the story but for the early scenes when he keeps running into the Ukranian at a Starbucks and then rescues him when after he's passed out drunk there to the many scenes when they sit in an empty lot next to the astronauts' house watching the stars, it feels like a good chunk of the novel isn't living up to the premise the author set up.
While finding some of these sections a little slow and tedious, I couldn't help but compare it in my mind to another tale about the loss of a child told from the father's perspective that I read this summer. In You Came Back A Novel by Christopher Coake, we start with a father who has just started to remake his life seven years after his son died, falling down stairs at home -- an event that led to the dissolution of his marriage. Just when he becomes engaged to the new woman in his life, a woman who bought his old house seeks him out to tell him his son's ghost in in the house, calling out to him. If you played the Stephen King game (suggested in his book on writing) of "What if" Coake delivers masterfully on every aspect you'd expect a man to have to deal with in that situation -- disbelief, anger, then a desperate wish to believe it's true, and then a a reconnection to his ex-wife when she hears the news.
In this novel about Keith's loss, I wanted to know so much more about his daughter, his relationship with his wife, and the three months he spent stuck up in the space station after she died, because conditions wouldn't let him return any sooner. By the end of the novel, though, the relationship with the Ukranian that didn't initially seem as consequential or relevant as any of those matters does play an important role in Keith's "re-entry" into life on earth. And admittedly, many of the details and story elements Kiefer choose to include fit with a man who lived so much in his head and had trouble connecting with people. Coming back to earth, Keith is forced to forge relationships -- he wants to do nothing but get back to work and lose himself into his career responsibilities, but NASA won't let him until it's obvious he's dealt with his grief and its main physical manifestation, severe migraines. The relationship with his Ukranian friend proves very important and in the last quarter of the book, their connection plays out in interesting ways. In the end, while I may not have been riveted to every single page, I still enjoyed the entire experience because the novel tells a powerful story about how one man deals with tragedy and begins to rebuild his life from the ashes of it.
The Infinite Tides, written by Christian Kiefer is a very well written, articulate book that I would describe is like watching an episode of Seinfeld, in that hardly anything actually happens. The book follows the life of astronaut Keith Corcoran in the wake of a tragic event on earth while on his first space mission onboard the ISS. After a prolonged return back home Keith returns to an empty house, a marriage in jeopardy and his career as an astronaut in question. While dealing with his numerous personal issues, including selling his home he forms a friendship with a neighbor that becomes monumental in his return to a normal life. With the added threat of earths survival in jeopardy from a potential asteroid looming through the entire story, the author somehow presents the reader with an interesting story despite the characters uninteresting day to day life.
Although the story can be considered slow to some readers as Christian Kiefer’s detailed writing style is tremendously descriptive, his suburb writing skills allows the book to be a must read.
The Infinite Tides is about a depressed astronaut named Keith Corcoran whose daughter dies and wife leaves him, causing him to have a mental breakdown while aboard the International Space Station and forcing him to come back to Earth on indefinite leave. The book contemplates the grieving process combined with loneliness and almost boredom as Keith returns with nothing to occupy his mind but the magnitude of his loss. As a mathematical genius, he sees mathematical algorithms and equations in everything, including the sequence of events in his life that lead him to where he is now.
The quality of writing is also extremely good, lending itself to an almost lyrical portrayal of what is going on. In fact, the book is, in a way, almost haunting. It deals in large part with the agony of loss, as well as the need to move forward even when there is nothing that can be done.
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