Imagine waking up with no memory of where you are, who you are or, in fact, anything.

Then imagine finding a letter that kindly informs you of your name and is signed by "the First You". The letter clearly instructs you to go see a doctor. The doctor tells you that this is not by far the first time that this has happened to you -that you have suffered from memory loss ever since your greatest love drowned.

You go "home", or at least that's what you've been told the strange house you woke in is, and begin to live as normally as you can possibly imagine.

You receive more letters from your previous self. Only they give you a completely different story on what actually happened to you. They claim that a fish -a shark- feeds on your memory. You receive instructions on how to hide from the shark. How to protect yourself.

Do you ignore the letters and trust your doctor? Or do you follow the queer instructions that are in every way illogical?


Eric Sanderson chooses to trust "The First Eric Sanderson" and learns of the great danger he faces. That danger is the shark.

He ventures out on a mission to uncover the truth and his own past.

My copy was in Finnish as I read it for my Finnish class, but the cover is on its own something new.

--Published in 2003, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall is a fairly new release in the postmodern era. For me, it was a first. With a unique style in description and imagery the book was a leap into the unknown for me. I had never before read a book with so many psychologically challenging concepts.

A fish that lives in the stream of thoughts and the flow of information. The connection between symbols, words and their meanings so real it can turn pieces of paper with the word "water" printed on them into actual water. Very over-the-top stuff. Even if interesting, the whole idea came out a bit too unrealistic to actually pull me in.

The story is told in a gripping manner, but as the whole idea was so alien to me, I found the book a little too weird. But hey, that's postmodernism! As anything else postmodern, the book definitely challenged what we know. It crossed boundaries and made the reader think. The pages were filled with intricate explanations of how everything works. They also featured pictures to support the book's (and generally postmodern) style as a whole. This included, for example, a fifty-page-long graphic staging the shark getting closer.

For me, it was interesting but lacked that special something that makes you read on no matter how late it is.

-Anna