JOURNEY WITH A BUYER AND SELLER OF VERY STRANGE OBJECTS, INFINITY DREAMS BY GLEN HIRSHBERG

Glen Hirshberg’s Infinity Dreams opens with main character Nadine, who lives in a remote part of the Northern Californian woods, about to be interviewed by a young journalist. Nadine lives with her partner Normal, who suffers from early-onset dementia, and is both her work and personal soulmate. Because of his unconventional occupation, which is the theme of the book, he is alternatively known as ‘The Collector’. Although the journalist gives an early vibe of naivety, Nadine quickly realises that the guy is digging for something deeper and has an agenda which stretches beyond a simple interview. But what is he genuinely after and does Infinity Dreams answer all the questions it throws at the reader? Partially, but it is open to question how satisfying these answers are.


Plotwise the interview between Nadine and the journalist is used as a literary mechanism to dig deep into their joint past, including the circumstances surrounding how the woman met ‘The Collector’, key stories from their shared history, which involve buying and selling desirable objects which have been obsessively tracked for years by those desperate enough to pay any price. The Collector has made obtaining what others have spent a lifetime searching for his life’s work, and with Nadine as his sidekick, they were very successful at achieving it.


As a concept this story fired the imagination, a man searching for what was near impossible to find was an intriguing idea, but the manner in which Glen Hirshberg has transferred this idea to paper left me rather cold and I found the whole experience a combination of bland and confusing. The story has an undiagnosed supernatural, almost Magical Realism element to it, but at different stages I genuinely struggled to follow what was going on. This was not Bizarro Fiction, where one might expect to be thrown random curveballs, and in the end amounted to a rather frustrating read.


Part of the problem was that both central characters Nadine and Normal AKA The Collector were so incredibly dull and one-dimensional. Try as I might, whenever The Collector was mentioned I kept thinking of a character of the same name in the long-running John Connolly ‘Charlie Parker’ series. Subconsciously I was obviously wishing I was reading elsewhere. Connolly’s ‘Collector’ was a vivid and monstrous creation and the central character in Infinite Dreams was such a limp flat disappointment in comparison. He is idolised, loved and hero-worshipped by Nadine and you will soon be wondering why, and if the author is attempting to present him as some kind of ‘enigmatic’ central character, it is a total failure. Nadine is no better and apart from a flashback scene to when she meets The Collector in Paris for the first time is equally boring. She seems to have zero purpose in her own life except for following her man around like a puppy, for a novel to have such non-descript central characters it is going to have problems holding the attention of the audience, no matter how quirky or weird the plot is.


Via the journalist Nadine spills the beans on her relationship and wheeling-dealing with The Collector, with these occasions being presented as story within stories. Various characters drop in any out of her tales and conversations, those who for example, collect coins, baseball cards, or significantly stranger stuff. These oddities are traded and sold at conventions, flea markets or antique malls with The Collector and Nadine using their extensive web of contacts to find what others obsessively want. One of the most fascinating of these involved the collection of rare songs from the favourite singers, with the collector claiming slightly more of the artist than the song. Another takes us back to Nazi Germany and a very strange story involving the baker of Hexenhaus, his product and an old vendetta.   


My favourite flashback took us to Paris in which a bizarre incident in a hostel (which might not exist) leads to Nadine meeting The Collector whom she chances upon after an encounter with ‘Buddha’ a hostel owner who is on his own hunt. It is in this segment we find out most about the young Nadine, what took her away from her Irish homeland to end up working with The Collector and the peculiar investigation he was working at the time.


Even though the prose is often very poetic and dreamlike it left me cold and I kept on thinking I was missing something. The pace is also incredibly slow and I came very close to giving up on the book on several occasions and as my concentration waned the supporting characters began to merge together and I struggled to tell them apart. Overall Infinity Dreams lacked any kind of urgency or spark with the two main characters seemed to sleepwalk through the story. I am usually a fan of Cemetery Dance and the style of fiction they release, but this one of their weaker releases.


Tony Jones

Infinity Dreams Paperback 
by Glen Hirshberg

There are people who collect coins, baseball cards, flashlights. They trade and sell them at conventions, flea markets, antique malls.
Those are not the people Nadine and Normal (a.k.a. The Collector) serve, and those places are not where you’ll find them.
Their quests have led them to decidedly less familiar characters and locales:

• A music obsessive who gives a little more than fandom—and takes a little more than music—from the artists he loves.
• A bouquiniste stall along the Left Bank of the Seine that has remained locked—for good reason—for 150 years.
• A box full of View-Master reels showing tiny photographs of places—some of which don’t exist.
• A former Nazi-in-training, haunted—to the point of life-crippling paralysis—by a taste.

But now, Nadine lives sequestered in the Northern California woods, caring for the Collector, who has slid into early-onset dementia. One day, against her better judgment, she accepts an interview request from a young journalist. Who might not be a journalist. He has come for their stories.
Or maybe for something else.
Meanwhile, down the coast, in the cities, a wildness has gotten loose, and the world is tilting out of true, and the boundaries between reality and dream are not just blurring but melting.
But is that for better or worse? And who gets to say?
Welcome to Infinity Dreams, a novel-in-stories about dreaming your life, and living in dreams, and the permeable limbo we insist on calling reality.

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