Product details: - Paperback: 208 pages
- Author: Chuck Palahniuk
- Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
- Publication Date: 1999-10-15
- Studio: Holt Paperbacks
- Manufacturer: Holt Paperbacks
- Package Dimensions: 8.2 x 49 x 75 inches
An underground classic since its first publication in 1996, Fight Club is now recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels published in this decade. Chuck Palahniuk's darkly funny first novel tells the story of a godforsaken young man who discovers that his rage at living in a world filled with failure and lies cannot be pacified by an empty consumer culture. Relief for him and his disenfranchised peers comes in the form of secret after-hours boxing matches held in the basements of bars. Fight Club is the brainchild of Tyler Durden, who thinks he has found a way for himself and his friends to live beyond their confining and stultifying lives. But in Tyler's world there are no rules, no limits, no brakes.
Customer reviews:  I embrace my own festering diseased corruption, 2010-09-01
I am going to break the first rule of Fight Club, with apologies to Tyler Durden and Chuck Palahniuk. I am going to talk about Fight Club, the book, and also the club itself, since it is too hard to dance around the central theme and still review the book. Fight Club is the main organizing principle, the central idea in a book crammed with ideas. Call them recurring motifs, trains of thought, running gags--Fight Club is chock full o' them. Or is it Chuck full? Anywho, there are support groups for terminal illnesses, and the insomniacs who fake it so they can attend the meetings and cry themselves to sleep. An unreliable narrator who works for as an analyst for insurance companies, calculating the cost of paying off settlements versus recalling a shoddy and unsafe product. Shopaholics who obsess over purchasing the perfect end table on Ikea online. Reader's Digest articles written by internal organs in the First Person: I Am Joe's Spleen. Haiku poems:
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Watching white moon face
The stars never feel anger
Blah, blah, blah, the end
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There is soap, made with lye and liposuctioned fat from the bottoms of rich women, then sold back to them as fancy scented soap in overpriced boutiques:
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At the Paper Street Soap Company, other teams pick the petals from roses or anemones and lavender and pack the flowers into boxes with a cake of pure tallow that will absorb their scent for making soap with a flower smell.
Marla tells me about the plants.
Some of the plants have obituary names: Iris, Basil, Rue, Rosemary, and Verbena. Some, like meadowsweet and cowslips, sweet flag and spikenard, are like the names of Shakespeare fairies. Deer tongue with its sweet vanilla smell. Witch hazel, another natural astringent.
Orrisroot, the wild Spanish iris.
Every night, Marla and I walk in the garden until I'm sure that Tyler's not coming home that night. Right behind us is always a space monkey trailing us to pick up the twist of balm or rue or mint Marla crushes under my nose.
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Who is Marla? She sounds like a sweet girl. My first love was named Marla. But this Marla--Marla Singer--is a faker who goes to terminal illness support groups to soak up sympathy like a vampire. She goes to groups that make no sense, like testicular cancer, or COPD groups where she chain smokes. She fakes suicide to get attention:
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"I embrace my own festering diseased corruption," Marla tells the cherry on the end of her cigarette. Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. "Burn, witch, burn."
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Chuck Palahniuk juggles all of these ideas, short quips, haiku poems, Reader's Digest excerpts, Ikea catalogue ads, and spins them all into a most compelling tale:
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"The second rule of fight club, Tyler yells, "is you don't talk about fight club."
Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don't remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn't so much like a family as it's like he sets up a franchise.
What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.
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I am Joe's Festering Gall Bladder Talking About Fight Club
Fight Club is a brilliant idea, and like the rug in The Dude's crib, it really pulls the whole room together. Is this Chuck Palahniuk's first novel? If so, he comes out swinging, with a one-two punch--great left jab and right hook. He really captures the angst and rage of a generation of men raised without fathers, with no great cause, no great war, no great depression, to fight for or against. The anti-consumerism thrust of wanting to chuck it all away and start fresh with only the things that really matter. The bare minimum. Palahniuk would churn out many more novels after this--most with short punchy titles like Rant, Snuff, or Choke, but it is hard to imagine that any of those books (which I haven't read yet, so I am just supposing) could pack as mean a punch as Fight Club.
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The lye clinging in the exact shape of tyler's kiss is a bonfire or a branding iron or an atomic pile meltdown on my hand at the end of a long, long road I picture miles away from me. Tyler tells me to come back and be with him. My hand is leaving, tiny and on the horizon at the end of the road.
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Permit me one last digression: One of the many ideas in Fight Club was that Tyler Durden worked as a projectionist and would splice in frames of disturbing images, just a blink of something that would register subliminally. In the book The Magic Christian, by Terry Southern, which was also made into a film with Peter Sellers, Raquel Welch, and Ringo Star, the protagonist (or perhaps he is more of an antagonist), an eccentric millionaire who uses his money for humiliating pranks, to see how far people will go for money, also splices clips into movies in a similar fashion. Just wondering if Chuck had read that book, or if he just picked the idea up as it floated through the zeitgeist.
Bottom Line, though, is that Fight Club is a knock-out of a novel. They should make this into a movie, but it's hard to imagine how you could translate this experimental prose cut-up into a film.
Fight Club
You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I Am Jack's Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection (Smart Pop) by Read Mercer Schuchardt and Chuck Palahniuk
The Magic Christian (Terry Southern)
Choke
Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
Haunted: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk
Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk
Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk
"Because everything up to now is a story," Tyler says, "and everything after now is a story."
 I am Jack's review of this book, 2010-08-11
I had read a lot of Palahniuk's work prior to reading Fight Club, which I would imagine is rare, as most people familiarize themselves with him after having seen the movie that is based on this book. I still think it's his best book to date.
It is much easier in the book to foresee the 'trick' ending, I think.
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