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TITLE: Choke AUTHOR: Chuck Palahniuk PAGES: 306 FORMAT: Hardcover ISBN: 978-0385720922 BUY IT: Amazon RATING: 5/5 [in the genre] or 9/10 [all books I’ve ever read]. FOR: Anyone who has read or seen Fight Club. Fans of horror movies. Fans of Bret Easton Ellis, Don DeLillo, George Saunders, or Quentin Tarantino. People who won’t mind a lot of graphic sex and violence. Would-be urban philosophers. |
The Basics: If Gaiman is my literary hero, Palahniuk is my literary god. He’s made his way to favorite author status in a remarkably short time, to join Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodr Dostoyevsky, and Diana Wynne Jones. He’s our Oscar Wilde, with an R rating. Choke has every ounce the brutal sarcasm and psychological torment of The Picture of Dorian Gray, but with teeth. Passages will make you recoil and cringe, passages verging on pornographic, verging on psychotic. Yet never exploitative. Never overdone. The explicit excesses of the book only serve to make Victor’s pathos more real as he struggles to reconcile his tumultuous childhood with a cruel and bleakly disappointing adulthood. As with all Palahniuk’s heroes, he is outwardly a complete cad, inwardly a broken toy. The plot takes you through Victor’s struggles to support his dying mother, dropping you off at an ending that is neither happy nor sad nor definitive, but ever hopeful.
Plot (5/5): Palahniuk is a master of the nonlinear. The book alternates between first-person narration of Victor’s current life, mingled with shocking facts and back-alley philosophy, and third-person accounts of Victor’s childhood, told by a cold and loathing narrator. The jumps allow us to piece Victor’s life together, observing his pathology while simultaneously glimpsing its origins. It’s both horrifyingly beautiful and tragic. The turn is psychotic, of course, and leaves both reader and Victor lost and reeling. We break as he breaks. It’s a fast moving read, even when it seems that little movement occurs.
Concept (5/5): A sex addict feigns choking to collect money for the treatment of a mother who kidnapped and abandoned him repeatedly as a child. And it only gets weirder from there. But, it works. It feels authentic, even at its most ridiculous. The satire is so sharp that you feel these people and situations probably exist out there somewhere, with different names and faces. Just ridiculous enough to make the truest of points.
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