The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel [Hardcover]

Steven Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2007

Eric Sanderson wakes up one day with no idea who or where he is. A note instructs him to call a Dr. Randle, who informs him that he is undergoing yet another episode of memory loss and that for the last two years—since the tragic death of his great love, Clio, while vacationing in Greece—he’s been suffering from an acute disassociative disorder. But there may be more to the story, or it may be a different story altogether. As Eric Sanderson begins to examine letters and papers left behind by “the first Eric Sanderson” and the staggering tale they seem to contain, he and the reader embark on a quest to recover the truth and to escape the predatory forces that threaten to devour him. Moving with the pace and momentum of a superb thriller, exploring ideas about language and information as well as identity, The Raw Shark Texts is ultimately a novel about the magnitude of love and the devastating effect of losing that love.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, March 2007: Not since Fight Club have a I read a book that sizzled with such fierce originality and searing vision as Steven Hall's electrifying debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts. It's a twisting, trippy thriller that tears through the landscape of language, revealing the lurking terrors uncovered in every letter of the written word. Steven Hall swims in the same surreal waters as pop-culture pioneers David Lynch and Michel Gondry, and The Raw Shark Texts deserves to be shelved somewhere between Trainspotting and Life of Pi. It pulls you under like a riptide, leaving you exhausted, exhilarated, and gasping for air.

But don't just take our word for it. We asked Audrey Niffenegger, one of the most creative contemporary writers working today, to share with readers her take on Steven Hall's debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts. Check out her exclusive Amazon guest review below. --Brad Thomas Parsons

Guest Reviewer: Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Books Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. A visual artist, she shows her artwork at Printworks Gallery in Chicago. The Time Traveler's Wife, her first novel, was an international bestseller and was one of Amazon.com's Best Books of 2003. It won several awards and is being made into a major motion picture. Her visual novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress, were recently published by Harry N. Abrams. Miss Niffenegger is currently hard at work on her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, a ghost story set in London's Highgate Cemetery.

Eric Sanderson has lost his memory, his girl, his life as he once knew it. His pre-amnesiac self is sending him letters, a sort of correspondence course on how to be Eric Sanderson. Unfortunately, this previous self didn't really have it all together either. This is too bad, because the source of all the trouble is a conceptual shark, a Ludovician shark, no less. Soon Eric is on the run, trying to piece it all together and find true love before his mind gets wiped by the shark for the twelfth and probably final time.

Steven Hall is an inventive, funny and extremely smart writer. I am a letterpress printer and a typophile, and I was drawn to his book because of the typography: The Raw Shark Texts is riddled with typographic games, codes, a flip book, and a boatload of very elegant plot devices that hinge on collisions between the Information Age and the imagination. At one point Eric and Scout, his guide/love interest, are speeding away from the conceptual shark on a motorbike. Scout eludes the shark by exploding a letter bomb, a bomb made out of old metal type; the type diverts the shark into a stream of random letterforms. At this I practically fell off the couch with admiration.

There's plenty to groove on in The Raw Sharks Texts even if you're not a type maven. There's echoes of Cyberpunk, Borges, Auster; there is adventure on the high seas, lost love, an exploration of what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. The Raw Sharks Texts is huge fun, and I gleefully recommend it. --Audrey Niffenegger

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From Publishers Weekly

Hall's debut, the darling of last year's London Book Fair, is a cerebral page-turner that pits corporeal man against metaphysical sharks that devour memory and essence, not flesh and blood. When Eric Sanderson wakes from a lengthy unconsciousness, he has no memory. A letter from "The First Eric Sanderson" directs him to psychologist Dr. Randle, who tells Eric he is afflicted with a "dissociative condition." Eric learns about his former life—specifically a glorious romance with girlfriend Clio Aames, who drowned three years earlier—and is soon on the run from the Ludovician, a "species of purely conceptual fish" that "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self." Once he hooks up with Scout, a young woman on the run from her own metaphysical predator, the two trek through a subterranean labyrinth made of telephone directories (masses of words offer protection, as do Dictaphone recordings), decode encrypted communications and encounter a series of strange characters on the way to the big-bang showdown with the beast. Though Hall's prose is flabby and the plethora of text-based sight gags don't always work (a 50-page flipbook of a swimming shark, for instance), the end result is a fast-moving cyberpunk mashup of Jaws, Memento and sappy romance that's destined for the big screen.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Canongate U.S.; First Edition edition (April 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841959111
• ISBN-13: 978-1841959115
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (120 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #580,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Odd, different, and enjoyable, March 17, 2007

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel (Hardcover)

Lots of it's good, so let's start with that part. It gets off to an ordinary start - the protagonist has amnesia, so it could be about anything or nothing. It happened just after the death of a wonderful young woman who had taken him into his life. Then peculiarities emerge. This isn't usual amnesia, it recurs. He has these attacks.

He is attacked, it turns out. Something, equal parts philosophical abstraction and carnivore, has chosen Eric Sanderson as prey. With this revelation, we're down the rabbit hole and into a rubbery fantasy world. It's a world like none you've ever seen before, where information turns solid and solid objects are subject to debate. Characters develop reasonably well, with the exception of Mycroft Ward. The writing gets a bit overheated at times and the concept has soft spots, but both progress toward a satisfying end, one that has elements of "Griffin & Sabine" and Gaiman's "Neverwhere," but is wholly its own creature.

There's enough here to keep a reader moving along. If your imaginative "inner voice" moves its lips when it reads, there can be a lot to enjoy. I found a few points grating, though, and a tighter story would have been a better one. It's good, though. Some readers will get a lot from this one.

//wiredweird, reviewing a complimentary copy

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a fun, heady read, but in the end, no, July 16, 2008

By 

D. Allyn (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel (Hardcover)

Okay, let's start with the title. Raw Sharks Texts. Wow, must be a play on "Rorscharch test" Cool, huh? Well, not so fast. What is a "raw shark"? There's a shark in the book, but it's not raw, per se. In fact, the idea of "rawness" is never mentioned in the book. In other words, the title is fun and seemingly clever but in reality, it's a strained, ersatz clever.

That's my overall take on the book: fun and seemingly clever but at the end of the day, strained and in the end, not very fulfilling.

The writing is clear and easy to read (at least in the first half). In fact, it pulls you forward. Partly that's because the main character is very likable. And the semiotic/sci fi elements are fun.

But it's also because you want to know how Hall is going to wrap it all up in the end without resorting to the obvious. Alas he clearly couldn't figure out how to do that, so he didn't. You're left with two possible endings, neither of which is satisfying alone (one being obvious and the other being a non-ending). These endings are supposed to be more satisfying because you get two of them.

The second half is confusing (and dull) and the great tension between the two main characters is hard to fathom.

I did love the idea of primitive creatures emerging in the morass of data floating around us--the recapitulation of evolution in conceptual form, but the idea is essentially dropped for a second plot line that goes basically nowhere. Ah, but is there a nowhere or is everywhere nowhere and nowhere is always here?

The one word that reviewers seem to use most when describing The Raw Shark Texts is memorable, and indeed I think it shall be. That is to say, I imagine I will remember the book. Of course, the idea of knowing that one will remember something is intriguing. Is there any way to know what we will remember? Furthermore is there any way to know (e.g. remember) that which we once thought we would remember but have now forgotten? If these questions interest you, The Raw Shark Texts may indeed be for you.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Literary Floundering: Adrift in Deep Water with the Great White Non-Shark, May 13, 2007

By 

Fred V. Lowe Jr. (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel (Hardcover)

I got through the first 50 pages or so of this wannabe innovative novel not sure what I was on to, but the writing was good enough, the unfolding plot odd and exciting enough to spur me on. Midway along, I started to really like the story -- and then, a hundred pages further , I was not so sure any more. Quickly the read became a downhill slide. Although beautifully written and highly, intriguingly imagined, the book's qualities fail to disguise a fairly hackneyed plot: amnesiac victim of some unknown trauma must discover his past and present reality. But then, what IS reality? Pursued by a conceptual, man/mind-eating shark, our hero sets literal (or not literal?)sail to solve that always too-grand question.

Does he resolve his existential dilemmas? (Yes, there are several such dilemmas, which means there's at least one too many.) By the end, I didn't much care. I finished the book out of duty, hoping to the last the story would redeem itself. Alas not.

Hitchcock did it much, much better.