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Shark Paperback – 5 Mar. 2015
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Will Self
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Will Self
(Author)
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Print length480 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherPenguin
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Publication date5 Mar. 2015
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Dimensions12.9 x 2.9 x 19.8 cm
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ISBN-100141046384
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ISBN-13978-0141046389
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Product details
- Publisher : Penguin; 1st edition (5 Mar. 2015)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0141046384
- ISBN-13 : 978-0141046389
- Dimensions : 12.9 x 2.9 x 19.8 cm
-
Best Sellers Rank:
363,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 34,603 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- 44,182 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)
- Customer reviews:
Product description
Review
An exciting, mesmerizing, wonderfully disturbing book. Go with it and it will suck you under ― Daily Telegraph
Breathtaking and dazzling. An exhilarating tour-de-force ... immersing the reader in a trippy Odyssey ― Daily Mail
Intellectually dazzling and emotionally frazzling. Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation ― Guardian
Will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain ― Independent
Highly enjoyable, vividly, even profoundly imagined. Self is creating something rather grand ― Sunday Times
Breathtaking and dazzling. An exhilarating tour-de-force ... immersing the reader in a trippy Odyssey ― Daily Mail
Intellectually dazzling and emotionally frazzling. Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation ― Guardian
Will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain ― Independent
Highly enjoyable, vividly, even profoundly imagined. Self is creating something rather grand ― Sunday Times
From the Author
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012. He lives in South London.
From the Inside Flap
When the Creep, an American resident in the 1970s at the therapeutic community in north London supervised by maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner, starts to tell rambling stories of thrashing about in the water while under attack from sharks, Busner has to decide whether they are schizoid delusions or some sort of reality.
From the Back Cover
When the Creep, an American resident in the 1970s at the therapeutic community in north London supervised by maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner, starts to tell rambling stories of thrashing about in the water while under attack from sharks, Busner has to decide whether they are schizoid delusions or some sort of reality.
About the Author
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012, and Shark. His most recent novel, Phone, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He lives in south London.
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Customer reviews
4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
49 global ratings
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 October 2016
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Hard to follow with present past & 'illusionary' material - influenced by mental health & drug use.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 June 2017
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all great, thanks!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 August 2017
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Can't put a good book down
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Readers of Will Self’s previous (Booker shortlisted) novel Umbrella will find Shark more than a little familiar. We revisit psychiatrist Zack Busner, running an experimental Concept House, offering psychiatric patients a communal living arrangement without wards, locks and restraints. The style is similar to Umbrella, with long slabs of text, eschewing conventional paragraphing, punctuation or linear style. It’s like stream of consciousness on acid. In fact, very specifically, it *is* stream of consciousness on acid.
One of the particularly impressive feats of this style of narration is that it never draws breath. Whilst there are full stops, there’s no point where you can see a change of scene or a natural pause. Yet the reader does zip from scene to scene, time to time in the middle of sentences, in the middle of words. And it's all chock full of references. There are references within the references. Even when you know what is going on, it is hard to see how it is done. It is smooth and seamless, perhaps like the sharkskin fabric of which all the suits in the novel seem to be made.
However, whereas Umbrella had a very focused narrative beneath all the fog and choppy timelines, Shark does not. If anything, it seems to be a loose collection of short stories, each centring around one person who is, in some way, associated with Concept House on a particular day in 1970. The stories themselves might be from before 1970 (some wartime stories); during or after that date. Dates are seldom given; they must be inferred from events taking place in the wider world. Taken together, they might be supposed to create some sort of “state of the nation” narrative of the second half of the 20th century. Of course, they are not presented in discrete stories – they cut back and forth, buried in swathes of pretty abstract meandering. By meandering, I mean the kind of stuff you occasionally hear from a mad alcoholic, often in sentences with subjects and verbs, sometimes with obscure vocabulary, but seldom actually making any sense.
If you haven’t read Umbrella, Shark may well intrigue, fascinate, impress, surprise, delight. It is fizzy, it is slippy, it is very, very distinctive. It may repel, it may frustrate, it may infuriate. It’s a long, hard book.
But if you know Umbrella, there is a fair chance that, despite its clear merits, Shark may disappoint and, even worse, bore you.
One of the particularly impressive feats of this style of narration is that it never draws breath. Whilst there are full stops, there’s no point where you can see a change of scene or a natural pause. Yet the reader does zip from scene to scene, time to time in the middle of sentences, in the middle of words. And it's all chock full of references. There are references within the references. Even when you know what is going on, it is hard to see how it is done. It is smooth and seamless, perhaps like the sharkskin fabric of which all the suits in the novel seem to be made.
However, whereas Umbrella had a very focused narrative beneath all the fog and choppy timelines, Shark does not. If anything, it seems to be a loose collection of short stories, each centring around one person who is, in some way, associated with Concept House on a particular day in 1970. The stories themselves might be from before 1970 (some wartime stories); during or after that date. Dates are seldom given; they must be inferred from events taking place in the wider world. Taken together, they might be supposed to create some sort of “state of the nation” narrative of the second half of the 20th century. Of course, they are not presented in discrete stories – they cut back and forth, buried in swathes of pretty abstract meandering. By meandering, I mean the kind of stuff you occasionally hear from a mad alcoholic, often in sentences with subjects and verbs, sometimes with obscure vocabulary, but seldom actually making any sense.
If you haven’t read Umbrella, Shark may well intrigue, fascinate, impress, surprise, delight. It is fizzy, it is slippy, it is very, very distinctive. It may repel, it may frustrate, it may infuriate. It’s a long, hard book.
But if you know Umbrella, there is a fair chance that, despite its clear merits, Shark may disappoint and, even worse, bore you.
9 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 November 2016
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Am in the process of reading Shark .. it's abstract, poetic prose style is immediately engaging, however, I found myself trying to be more accurate than just 'abstract' as clearly realism and abstraction have been married together. This particular example of Will Self is choc full of social realism, from our modern age too. It is extremely graphic, and shocking in places. A scene around the middle of the book includes a teenager who having become drunk or drugged, is hanging upside down on a climbing frame volatile vomitting at the faces of what she calls 'Mongs'...and the dreadful part of which is her mother is the one who has responsibility for the group of disabled children with the downs syndrom and other illnesses. The drug/alcoholism rife in the community, from which Jeanie stems. I was reading about the modern texts of other authors, who use psychology, as an aspect of their writing, so that the engagement of the reader is part of the meaningful abstractions. I found that Self has perhaps deliberately obscured the 'shocking' part of some of the character's lives by the method of writing, but, wonderfully, the reader is brought into the reality of the chaos of the characters existence. They are memorable. A bit of a Ken Loach effect. It is a window into another world. I will remember the film Kes, for example, forever.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2014
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No surprise that the star ratings given for this book are either ones or fives, this is literary marmite. You will either love this book, or hate it. I loved it, partly for it's unashamed modernism, and partly for its willingness to tackle both difficult ideas and hard facts about the difficulty of living. What I liked most though, was the sense of time and place, especially in the parts set in the 1970's, I could taste my childhood when I was reading those. .
8 people found this helpful
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