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Loading... The Raw Shark Textsby Steven Hall
 usefuljack | May 17, 2013 |  I'm not finished with this book, but so far, I'm finding it kind of delightful. I will say that I've never read a book that is so much like a screenplay - but every so often often there are surprisingly poignant passages indicative of real emotional truth. (  ) usefuljack | May 17, 2013 | Library discard. 1 of 12 for $6. Mine = different ed & cover.  velvetink | Mar 31, 2013 | Really interesting concepts but the author isn't too great with words. He is not so interested in making beautiful or creative phrases, but more with telling the story. I felt many parts were kind of cliche, but I still really enjoyed it, because there was such an interesting concept at the core. ( ) shiray | Mar 31, 2013 | Not a terribly innovative or 'deep' book, despite its attempts. A definite pastiche of the po-mo/intellectual/post-Danielewski lit from a few years ago. But, I will admit that it was a nice end-of-summer read. Perched on the back of my toilet, 'The Raw Shark Texts' (*groan* at that pun) was sufficiently engaging in the 'oh no, my legs fell asleep on the crapper!' sort of way. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have that happen. (  ) librarianwilk | Mar 31, 2013 |
 The Raw Shark Texts manages to reach the loftiest goal of speculative fiction: making its outlandish situations illuminate real human emotion. When the second Sanderson begins to share his previous incarnation's affecting grief over his lost love Clio, the concept of a memory-eating shark takes on additional layers of significance. Comparisons with The Matrix, Fight Club and Memento have been thrown around, and it's telling that all these action-thrillers were on the big screen. The prose is often self-important and less brilliant than the situations it describes, and many of the story elements dogmatically adhere to Hollywood conventions. But Hall borrows a number of effective techniques from film. A metaphysical book such as this easily could have become dense and inaccessible, but Hall's unrelenting focus on visual storytelling keeps it lucid. The book fully succeeds in exploring the tenuous hold we have on our sense of self, which is, after all, only "a concept wrapped in skin and chemicals."  The rest of Hall's ambitiously conceived but irritatingly self-serious novel concerns Sanderson's "Jaws"-like quest to put an end to the shark before it eats him, punctuated by a stock romantic plot and pictorial games that include a flip-book shark attack. Oddly, given all the textual high jinks, Hall's weakness for ending chapters on cliffhangers suggests that his book may actually wish it were a film.  Quirky even for metafiction--the novel includes abstract diagrams and flipbooks--Hall's debut can be confusing. But when he hits his stride, particularly during a climactic manversus-shark chase on the high seas, Texts is exhilarating. B+ 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. First things first, stay calm." So reads a cryptic letter early in The Raw Shark Texts, but it's difficult not to get worked up by Steven Hall's dizzying debut novel. Already the object of a bidding war among filmmakers, the book grabs readers with a series of set-ups reminiscent of everything from Jaws to Memento.
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