Life, the Universe and Everything is, in my humble opinion anyway, pretty ambitious subject matter for a novelist’s debut, but such is the focus of The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall – one of the weirdest books I’ve read in quite some time. The novel begins with a man (the Second Eric Sanderson) choking, lying on the floor and with no memory of who he is or how he got in that state. Thanks to a letter addressed to him by the First Eric Sanderson, he is led to a psychologist who informs him that he is suffering from a very rare psychological condition – a psychotropic fugue “thought to have been the result of prolonged emotional trauma stemming from the death of his girlfriend Clio Aames, who drowned in a scuba diving accident while the pair were on holiday in Greece.” While Dr. Randle proves to be only marginally helpful, it’s from her that he learns that he’s been suffering from this condition for the past two years, and in that time has had eleven recurrences, each one erasing more and more of his memories.
The puzzle of Sanderson’s condition begins to take form when he returns home and is immediately inundated with letters, strange coded messages (a video of a flickering lightbulb, for instance), and dictaphones, all addressed to him from his pre-amnesiac self. Through this odd correspondence, Sanderson comes to understand that over the past several years he’s suffered repeated attacks from a Ludovician – a highly territorial conceptual shark that feeds on memories and language. The story that follows is an odyssey, moving him back and forth through time and planes of reality, to discover how to destroy the shark and save himself.
And if all of that sounds terribly confusing and odd, than that’s because it is.
Perhaps more than anything I’ve read so far this year, this novel made me work, and I appreciate that. Reading this book was an experience that was equal parts romantic, weird, and downright confusing - maneuvering through the jargon was a chore for me at times - however after the second reading (yes, I read it twice), I found myself appreciating it and its eccentricities more and more. It’s clear to me that readers will either love or hate this book, and there’s certainly plenty to criticize - the often-times vapid dialogue, for instance - but I’m a woman who’s willing to forgive a writer many things if the story itself is a solid one. Finally, it has an ending that begs to be discussed, so Paul (and anyone else feeling so inclined) - let’s.
Up Next: The Big Girls, by Susanna Moore
The puzzle of Sanderson’s condition begins to take form when he returns home and is immediately inundated with letters, strange coded messages (a video of a flickering lightbulb, for instance), and dictaphones, all addressed to him from his pre-amnesiac self. Through this odd correspondence, Sanderson comes to understand that over the past several years he’s suffered repeated attacks from a Ludovician – a highly territorial conceptual shark that feeds on memories and language. The story that follows is an odyssey, moving him back and forth through time and planes of reality, to discover how to destroy the shark and save himself.
And if all of that sounds terribly confusing and odd, than that’s because it is.
Perhaps more than anything I’ve read so far this year, this novel made me work, and I appreciate that. Reading this book was an experience that was equal parts romantic, weird, and downright confusing - maneuvering through the jargon was a chore for me at times - however after the second reading (yes, I read it twice), I found myself appreciating it and its eccentricities more and more. It’s clear to me that readers will either love or hate this book, and there’s certainly plenty to criticize - the often-times vapid dialogue, for instance - but I’m a woman who’s willing to forgive a writer many things if the story itself is a solid one. Finally, it has an ending that begs to be discussed, so Paul (and anyone else feeling so inclined) - let’s.
Up Next: The Big Girls, by Susanna Moore
Labels: authors F-J, books, brits do it better, fiction, mystery
3 Comments:
I've been wondering about this book. Probably still won't be able to get to it for a while, but your review has kept my interest going... Also, if you read it twice, would it be fair to say "15 down"? Just curious.
Good, I'm glad! And no, although I did read it twice I see no need to count it twice since I'm a bit ahead of schedule, I'm about to find myself with a whole load of extra time on my hands, and I never did finish reading My Sister's Keeper due to my deep annoyance with it, so I'll let this make up for that.
And just to clarify, I didn't read it twice because I loved it that much, exactly, but because after I finished it I found myself saying, "Wait, huh? What?" and felt like I had to give it a second look for some reason. But that's another thing that I did like about the book.
I'm 50 or so pages into my 'first' reading and I really, really, really like it for what it seems to be doing and how it seems to be doing it. Let's see if that assessment holds up the deeper i get into it...
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