Shark
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
May 4th, 1970. A week earlier President Nixon has ordered American ground forces into Cambodia to pursue the Vietcong. By the end of the day four students will be shot dead by the National Guards in the grounds of Kent State University. On the other side of the Atlantic, it's a brilliant sunny morning after an April of heavy rain, and at the "Concept House" therapeutic community he has set up in the London suburb of Willesden, maverick psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner has been tricked into joining a decidedly ill advised LSD trip with several of its disturbed residents. Five years later, sitting in a nearby cinema watching Steven Spielberg's Jaws, Busner realizes the true nature of the events that transpired on that dread-soaked day, when a survivor of the worst disaster in the US Navy's history - the sinking of the USS Indianapolis - came face-to-face with the British Royal Air Force observer on the Enola Gay's mission to bomb Hiroshima.
Set a year before the action of his Booker-shortlisted Umbrella, Will Self's new novel Shark continues its exploration of the complex relationship between human psychopathology and human technological progress; and like Umbrella, weaves together multiple narratives across several decades of the twentieth century to produce a fiendish tapestry depicting the state we're trapped in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After declaring the novel dead in May in his Guardian article "The Novel Is Dead (This Time It's For Real)," Self returns with a new novel, and it is a maddening, uncompromising, serious, self-indulgent, and beautiful work. The second book in a planned trilogy, following Umbrella (which was shortlisted for the Man Booker), the novel reacquaints us with the unconventional psychiatrist Zack Busner. Busner is the proprietor of the Concept House, a mental health residence in which residents are given free rein. In an unbroken wall of text (no chapters or paragraph breaks), Self describes the many characters of the Concept House, including Lt. Claude Evenrude, who is scarred by what he did over Hiroshima as the target spotter for the Enola Gay, and Michael Lincoln, who watched men die as he floated in the shark-filled Pacific waters after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Their narratives, along with others, converge in a labyrinth of pyschedelic high modern voices ("Michael can see the drinkers' beery guffaws... plain as iron filings round a vulcanite rod"), which, while ceaselessly musical and electric, often feels claustrophobic and disorienting. Bound to exasperate as often as it thrills, Self's novel is a worthy follow-up, and comes as close to capturing the frightening bad trip of modern life as any book in recent memory.
