Raw Shark Texts
Jun 17th, 2008 by learningumbrella
The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel by Steven Hall.
I’d heard this novel compared to Fight Club, so I thought it would be good for me to stretch myself and read it. I didn’t like Fight Club, but it represents a genre that seems to appeal to the men I know (DH didn’t like the novel as much as the movie, but he did read the whole thing).
After reading Raw Shark, I realized I would not be passing it along to DH. It lacks the sarcastic social commentary, and instead is built on a rather flimsy intellectual flight into the realm of memes and whether ideas and concepts exist on their own outside of our minds. If I describe a lake, you start to form an image of a lake in your head. My lake just came into existence in both of our minds - can it exist on some sort of mental dimension and could there be strange conceptual fish swimming in those waters that could come out and attack our minds?
A man wakes up, remembering nothing of his life. There is a note that says to call a number. The number is for his shrink. But there are more letters, detailing how he’s being stalked by a “conceptual shark” that has eaten his memories and will come back to finish him off. He heads out to find help combating this shark, and it’s like Alice down the rabbit hole as things get stranger and stranger.
The end is ambivalent, as I knew it would be. Was he just crazy? Was it all real? Do I care? Not really.
