Has anyone read Fight Club? I spent all week reading, reading, and reading that book. I love the author and I think Fight Club was his most famous novel. I wasn't really into the movie so I never watched it. I'm going to rent it soon though and hopefully later this week I'll have a post about book to movie differences.
Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favorite authors. He's a Portland, Oregon local author and my first experience with him came when I moved to Oregon. My cousin’s had introduced me to his book Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon. My cousins lived in Salem, Oregon from the time they were both in elementary school and they had experienced a different life (to say the least). The first month I lived in Oregon, I was talking with my little cousin Alison, 13 at the time, and she told me that a week prior she had seen an elderly woman get hit by the transit. My cousin Ally and her older brother Evan were both raised in the heart of meth central Salem Oregon. Life wasn't something to look forward to where they were living but they made the best out of it. The reason I bring all this up is the book Fight Club reminds me of a lifestyle that is specific to the way people lived near where my cousins grew up. I would describe Chuck Palahniuk’s novels as the equivalent to horror films. I'm not a fan of watching scary movies and I'm even less of a fan of scary stuff that happens in real life. My cousin told me the story of the lady getting hit by the train as if it was an everyday occurrence and that really scared me. To not think twice about a human life, as if it's disposable, is something I have a hard time understanding.
Fight Club did a good job at explaining how people can live, or not live, with such a grim perspective on life. The monotonous daily grind can get to be too much for someone and they begin to look for something more or maybe something less. Fight Club is about a man who has extreme insomnia, or so you think in the beginning, who tries to find a way to release tension so he can sleep. So the nameless main character and a "friend", Tyler Durden, start the first Fight Club. Tyler slowly starts to become a major part of the main characters life until, you find towards the end of the book, Tyler is really his split personality. There are so many twists and turns as you read this book and the end is not monumental but it's still intriguing. It's hard to tell from the title and the plot and everything crazy that happens in the book, but in the last chapters the reader starts to realize that this is a love story. Wow.. what a book. I think my mind was blown after finishing it.
The Afterword chapter at the end of the book is where the author goes into detail about how he came to write such a twisted story. It all started with 8 rules, rules that had to apply to something. With books on the best seller shelves that were about bringing women together, Chuck Palahniuk, wanted to write a book that would bring men together. So he applied his 8 rules (such as; the first and second rule is "you don't talk about..") to a fight club. He says the rest of the stories where complied after asking his friends for crazy stories like how his friends worked as waiters and tainted peoples food. His friends were skeptical about him putting these real life scenarios in his fiction novel. But the author thought it didn't matter because they were just a bunch of guys with no more than a high school diploma and they probably weren't the first to think of these things. On his book tours he found out he was right. There were already fight clubs in major cities. There were people tainting rich people’s food long before he wrote about it.
What I really found amazing was that Fight Club wasn't even promoted. The publisher gave the author a very small amount of money so he wouldn't write it. But the author didn't know that's why he got such a small amount. He thought that any money was better than none so he wrote it anyway. I think it’s incredible for all that to happen and then for it to be turned into a movie.
This is the third or fourth book I've read by Chuck Palahniuk. The first was Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon. This book explained all the interesting sights and history of Portland. Like the water fountains downtown are called Benson Bubblers.. he wrote why. He also talks about the Shang-Hi tunnels, where back in the 20's there used to be speakeasies in these tunnels and when people got too drunk and passed out they would be hauled out of the tunnels into the ship yard (they were connected) and these people would be sold for human trafficking. He also talks about a self-cleaning house that was built in the early 1900's. It's a great tourist book and has a little of literally EVERYTHING. I gave it to my dad for his birthday the first year we lived in Oregon.
In this last year I read another novel by this author titled Lullaby. This was a great book. Lullaby is about a newspaper writer who had written obituaries for families who have had a baby die of sudden infant death syndrome. The writer starts to notice that all these families have the same nursery book and some have been left open on the last page that was read to their babies. He sees the link and discovers that this lullaby is a culling song that in ancient times was read to people suffering from famine and poverty to ease them into their deaths. Once the writer finds this out he takes up a mission to get rid of this book so babies will stop dying from SIDS. However he learns the culling song and finds that even if he thinks it accidentally he can kill whoever he is thinking about when he says it. Which is a terrible situation to be in if you are manically depressed like this character. He becomes his own worst enemy but he's not the only one who knows of the culling song. He meets a very successful real estate agent who has known about the culling song for years. You might say this story is somewhat of a love story as well (aren’t they all??). The end of this book is so twisted!! I recommend anyone to read it if they could stomach it.
In the spirit of Halloween, I'd encourage everyone to buy a short novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Happy reading everyone!!
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