The Raw Shark Texts to be adapted for Cinema

This from Sci-fi. Simon Beaufoy, screenwriter of such films as The Full Monty and Slumdog Millionaire, told a group of journalists that he has finished a draft of a screenplay based on the book The Raw Shark Texts, a novel by Steven Hall that deals with the metaphysical erasure of memory.

"OK, get this," Beaufoy said in a group interview on Nov. 6 in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he was promoting Slumdog Millionaire. "It's about conceptual sharks that eat your memory. It's like Memento and Jaws and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Just pair it all up. It's the most amazing flight of imagination I've read for 20 years."

If the premise was a tough sell in print, it was an even more challenging prospect in the visual medium of film. "Conceptual sharks are tricky," Beaufoy said. "It's really hard, but really fascinating. It's all inside someone's head. I just wanted to do something very different. That's how I stay fresh and interested, is to move to something completely different. I've only just finished the draft, but I have made attempt of it somehow, so you'll see."

With his work complete, pending any eventual rewrites, it is still a director's job to figure out what conceptual sharks look like. Beaufoy just dealt with the plot. "Yeah, I just write, 'Shark attacks.' It's not my problem."

Whether or not Beaufoy's script attaches a director or cast, he remains a fan of Hall's novel. "[The title] is a pun on the Rorschach test, the inkblot test. It's full of all that. It's extraordinary. You will never have read anything like it, so I really recommend it. You might only get halfway through and go, 'OK, that's enough madness.' But it is genuinely original. It's brilliant."

"The Raw Shark Texts, called “clever, playful . . . sharp and clear” by the Los Angeles Times and “a horror-dystopic-philosophical mash-up” by the New York Times Magazine, is a novel unlike any other. Eric Sanderson wakes up in a house one day with no idea who or where he is. Instructed by a mysterious note to visit a Dr. Randle, Eric learns that the agony of losing the love of his life in a scuba-diving accident three years before has destroyed his memory. But there may be more to the story, or it may be a different story altogether. As Eric begins to examine letters and papers left in the house by “the first Eric Sanderson,” a staggeringly different explanation for what is happening to Eric emerges, and he and the reader embark on a quest to recover the truth and escape the remorseless predatory forces that threatens to devour him. The Raw Shark Texts is a kaleidoscopic novel about the magnitude of love and the devastating effect of losing that love."

I've had this in my hands a few times but never bought it. Think I'll pick it up now. Let me know what you think of the book if you have read it.

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