The Financial Times: “… an intoxicating experience. Self’s powerful command of language animates the intense prose while his dry wit is given a freer rein than in Umbrella. Shark drives remorselessly on; it takes us with it.”
The Mail on Sunday: “Self is on a mission to revive modernist fiction and newcomers will find the text, excised of paragraphs and most punctuation, tough at first. But it is unmatched for vibrancy and sensation, and befits the novel’s raw, disturbing subjects – the traumatised lives that orbit Dr Busner’s therapeutic community.”
Esquire: “… a dazzling feat: one in which metaphors morph into memories and sentences are swilled around and intermingled like fish guts in a chum bucket.”
The Independent: “Shark will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain. Self’s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.”
The Sunday Times: “Self’s ugly, sinuous and ceaselessly inventive prose does an exceptional job of evoking consciousness, the mind’s ‘wriggling little thoughtfish’. Formally, he achieves a masterly balance of surface chaos and underlying design, creating an intricate tattoo of linked shark and nuclear imagery, just as his phrases echo and rhyme and connect. Overall, Shark generates a dream-like synthesis of rational and irrational, familiar and strange.”
