Bloody knuckles, Fascist carnage, and testicular cancer.
Written: Oct 06 '00 (Updated Oct 23 '00)
Product Rating:
Pros: Chuck Palahniuk knows how to depict a dark future of the world with black humor, white-knuckle suspense, pithy observations, and ingenius plot twists.
Cons: Some of the things in here are in bad taste, such as Marla Singer's mother.
Donlee_Brussel's Full Review: Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club: A Novel
Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel, Fight Club, has acquired a following, and rightfully so, become a cult classic. It's filled to the brim with brilliant wordplay, insightful narration, and satirical anti-mainstream consumerism concepts. The style of the novel is splendidly unconventional. Everything from haikus and homemade explosive recipes to anatomy perspectives are present in this no holds barred literary work of art. I'm a very happy camper if Chuck really is the future of in your face Gen-X fiction.
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends.
So begins our tale set atop the Parker-Morris Building with ten minutes before it’s blown to hell. Palahniuk’s trademark is opening all of his stories (Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters) near the end, where the carnage has already really gotten out of hand, where people are about to die. Our Narrator is screwed, and with three minutes remaining before he might die, he tells us how he got in this mess in the first place, he tells us “I remember everything.”
Welcome to the world of our hero. He’s an insomniac working for a corrupt car company, traveling to wherever his boss doesn’t want to go for meetings.
Our paladin is a corporate lap dog, jaded, disillusioned with his life. He’s depressed, suicidal, an IKEA addict. On flights, he contemplates his own death by plane crash. Everything has become a routine to him.
I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour gain an hour.
This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
Our Narrator is in dire need of a way to change his life, something to make him feel alive again, and sadly, Angela Hayes is already taken.
So to cure his insomnia, our main man goes to different types of cancer, disease, and terminal illness support groups. And although he’s in perfect health, he’s been going to these meetings for two years and hasn’t been caught doing so because “Anyone who might’ve noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back.” He tells us “…why I love support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.” It is at these meetings that our Narrator meets Marla Singer, another Faker, the Narrator’s antagonist/love interest. The support group meetings though, they’re nothing more than a quick fix.
Enter Tyler Durden. A night job worker who our protagonist meets on a nude beach: part-time movie projectionist, part-time banquet waiter. After our Narrator’s home and all his possessions within are destroyed by a bomb, a phone call is made. A changing of the guard occurs.
The phone rang in Tyler’s rented house on Paper Street.
Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.
And the phone rang…
Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
And the phone rang…
Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
And the phone rang and Tyler answered…
May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
Tyler and I agree to meet at a bar.
That night, Fight Club is created. It’s an escape for those with boring, everyday jobs, a place where yuppies can take their aggressions out on each other by beating the living hell out of each other. It’s a boys-only club with eight sacrosanct rules. Soon however, Tyler takes Fight Club up a notch with Project Mayhem, a fascist group rebels against society by way of antics that get more and more extreme, right up until the novel’s anti-climactic conclusion.
When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem has nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn’t care if other people got hurt or not. The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world.
Now to those who want to purchase the audio book because they think it'll be as excellent as Chuck Palahniuk's public readings of Fight Club, think again. Our audio book narrator, James J. Todd, is about as exciting as Chia Pets. He breathes no life whatsoever into the book for our listening pleasures. Monotonousness is the name of his game. The cheesy Elmore Leonard music interludes between the chapters don’t help either, nor does the fact that Todd reads at a snail pace making the audio book more than four hours long. Take my advice, save your $25 and don’t buy this nonessential item.
For those who are fans of the film, the novel is a must read. In so many ways it is superior to David Fincher's masterpiece. Several sections of the author's work were cut or altered by Jim Uhls for the big screen adaptation. For one thing, a passage I was fond of in the novel didn’t make it to the movie in any manner, Chapter 10. It’s an anecdote about what happens when Tyler pees in a rich woman’s perfume bottle with a Way of the Gun result.
For another, Chapter 20, arguably a segment of the book that elevated Fight Club to a whole other level, was reduced to nothing more than a Forrest Gump joke in the film. In the novel, Tyler is given the role of God, the chance to spare a man’s life that desperately needs to be changed. Sure Tyler is tackling the situation with daringly drastic measures, but it is for a noble cause, Durden is forcing Raymond K. Hessel to rethink his life. According to the audio commentary by David Fincher on the Fight Club DVD, this was the scene that made him want to read the novel. How did a scene like this get butchered for the flick-watching public?
Another prime example of botched execution is Chapter 26, an abrasive white-knuckle suspense scene. It’s baffling as to why the location of such a scene was switched from a moving bus in the book to an interrogation room in the movie. And finally, the novel’s brooding Catcher in the Rye-type ending is much more thought provoking than the film’s impressively cinematic pyrotechnics blowout.
Trust me when I tell you to read this enthralling masterwork. Chuck Palahniuk makes the apocalypse of Western Civilization sound so damn cool even I’m anticipating it.
The First Rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young...More at HotBookSale
The First Rule about fight club is you don t talk about fight club. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.