The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Steven Hall (Author) "I was unconscious..." (more)
Key Phrases: hallstand table, conceptual fish, conceptual loop, Mycroft Ward, Mark Richardson, Clio Aames (more...)

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Canongate U.S.; First Edition/First Printing 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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #144,882 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beyond grief, is there madness?, May 19, 2007

By	Christian McCallister "dr dolphin" (The waters of the Great Lakes) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Story: A man awakens, choking, in his apartment. When he finally catches his breath, he realizes that he has no idea who he is, where he is, how he got there, etc. But, he begins finding clues, that are from a very unexpected source: himself! He finds letters, telling him that he is Eric Sanderson, and the letters are from "The first Eric Sanderson". The letters tell him to call Dr. Randle, who will help him. When he meets Dr. Randle, she tells him that he has recurrent dissociative episodes, or repeated and worsening periods of amnesia. But, more letters arrive from himself, telling him that Dr. Randle means well, but might be wrong. Dr. Randle tells him to not read any letters he gets from himself. Eric Sanderson tries to not read the letters, or open the packages, but his curiosity eventually wins out.

Eric Sanderson is then plunged into a confusing world of semantics, linguistics, and abstract communication theories. The premise focuses on the analogy between a communication exchange resembling a flow or a current. The cumulative effect of all human communication is a network of conceptual flows, currents, lakes, and rivers. And, with all those bodies of virtual water, what happens? As Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) of Jurassic Park would say, "Life will find a way." Conceptual fish have evolved in the conceptual sea, with the largest being the Ludovician, the memory shark, that targets victims and eats their memories, either in little bites ("Uh, where did I put my keys?") or voraciously (e.g., Alzheimer's, amnesia). Eric Sanderson is the prey of a particularly nasty and persistent Ludovician.

Or is he? If Dr. Randle is right, Eric Sanderson is suffering from a resumption of the dissociative disorder, with psychogenic fugue (a flight from reality, often accompanied by delusions and physically fleeing all familiar settings), and that he must work to retain his sense of self and ignore his own letters from the past, which will only lead him further into delusion. Is she right?

Eric chooses to believe himself (i.e., the original Eric Sanderson), and he goes off on a strange quest to find others who understand conceptual fish and can help him fight off the Ludovician. He sees himself as in a battle to save his identity, and his quest takes him into ever more bizarre territory.

Throughout the story, there are hints at what might really be happening here. I honestly did not fully put it together until the very end, though, and then it seemed perfectly clear. I will not disclose any of that, as the ending is truly powerful, if it is not spoiled.

What I liked: Steven Hall writes well. Even when I found the story confusing and even painful (see below), I wanted to keep reading. Eric Sanderson, and the two main supporting characters, Scout and Dr. Trey Fidorous, are three-dimensional. Even the most bizarre aspects of the story were described well enough so that I could figure out what was going on (even when I couldn't believe it!).

An advisory: I am a clinical psychologist and, in that role, and as well in the role of a neighbor of a very troubled young man, I have had several opportunities to read the journals of people suffering from delusions and psychoses. The early parts of this book, where Eric Sanderson delves deeper and deeper into the idea that there is a conceptual shark trying to eat his memory, very closely resembles the journals that I have read. I cannot know how others would feel, but reading these parts of The Raw Shark Texts was uncomfortable for me for two reasons. It reminded me of the suffering of those with very severe mental illness, and it made me concerned that, if this book were read by a person having active delusions, they might struggle to separate reality from delusion, as does the protagonist of the book. Eric's plunge into the conceptual world so resembles delusional psychosis, that a person with a severe mental illness might find it a trigger for paranoid fears. This book might also be a painful reminder for a person with a history of delusional episodes, or a person who has lost a loved one, who had mental illness, to suicide.

Conclusion: I will never forget The Raw Shark Texts, and it was a remarkable, albeit not always comfortable, reading experience. I was not sure, for a long time, what genre to assign this book. I am still not entirely sure, but tragedy would fit well. A well-written, heart-wrenching tragedy.

27 of 31 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 (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

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

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good premise, but flails fast..., February 28, 2008

By	J. Erickson "Server of food and wine!" (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm not sure if this guy has watched too many episodes of Lost and Alias and doesn't seem to realize that the whole 'leave half the story out until the viewer/reader is so disgruntled that they have to finish the series/book because they have to know the answer only to be disappointed' thing is really tired and worn out and we're sick of it.

Sorry, run on sentence.

I thought that the premise looked interesting, but it really goes nowhere and after being halfway into the book I was still wondering when something was going to happen. Too many loose ends in the first half too. Like, umm, wouldn't you think the therapist at this point, after a year of him being missing, would have done something? It's really a convoluted mess and it was everything I could do to get through it.

I like wordplay and interesting fonts and types and challenges put into a novel. But this one just has no cohesion and drags. If I can't get interested and vested enough in a book in the first 75 or so pages, well, then something is wrong. It just doesn't read as compelling.

If you want something compelling, gripping, with an amazing use of wordplay then look up and find Jonathan Safran Foer's A Primer For The Punctuation Of Heart Disease. That rocks. And will haunt you. This book, unfortunately is just a hum drum waiting to pick up speed that never happens.