I visited my old stomping ground of Brooklyn last weekend. My host suggested we make a feast using her newly acquired copy of The Silver Spoon cookbook. This way we could invite lots of people over thereby maximizing my social coverage and minimizing the planning. That’s pretty much my favorite combo. So, we worked the Silver Spoon over, not too hard since Brooklyn is now an artisanal food paradise; garlic was mashed, oil was infused, sage was stuffed, pancetta was wrapped, fettuccine was tossed, and in honor of the holiday Jameson’s was poured. All in all, a very nice way to start off my visit.

But, before I let this turn into another blog about my fondness for cooking and the cookbooks that foster that love, I’d better get back to the task at hand. I have a list somewhere…

I promised a while back that I was going to elaborate on a particularly exciting book that I was reading in January. And now it’s finally time and I am all kinds of excited. If you’ll take yourself back to early February when I had just returned from a book conference in Portland, OR, you may remember me fussing about a book that I had just finished called The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Well, I will continue to fuss and now in greater detail.

This is the debut novel of Mr. Hall, a charming and sincere Englishman I was fortunate enough to meet briefly in Portland. He sets himself a very high bar, a high-concept high bar to be sure. The premise is that one Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memory of his existence; who he is, where he is, why he is, the lot. He almost immediately finds a note from his previous self giving him a brief set of directions and some inadequate explanations. After this hefty set-up with its Memento-ish feel, Hall then embarks on a pretty incredible construction of multiple realities that take an awful lot of architecture both real and conceptual.

Even with all this concept to Hall manages to string a real story through it, one that is crafted from the supposed reality of Eric Sanderson’s life to the dissociative tangle of words and conceptual predators that infest his mind. I really enjoyed this book and I am truly impressed that it held together so well, a feat that eludes many authors. Both Pynchon and Murakami came to mind. The concerns of memory, and loss, and loss of memory mixed with the seeming breaks from reality that tussle and fight with the actual reality for dominance render an intricate design that belies simplicity of story. This ultimately makes The Raw Shark Texts greater than the experiments that fiction of this genre often ends up being.