#chuck palahniuk
“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.“
- Chuck PalahniukShalom Harlow | © Ellen von Unwerth
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We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club.
Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.
AKA Tyler Durden.
“It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
Artwork by Todd Mclellan
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Book Covers (21 / 120) → Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
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BOOK REVIEW
Title: Invisible Monsters Remix
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Genre:Contemporary
My Rating: ★★★★ (4 of 5 stars)
A reentry to Chuck Palahniuk’s universe after long stays in more run-of-the-mill (though not necessarily less entertaining) worlds in literature can send you a refreshing bolt of shock, reminding you of this author’s forte. He doesn’t hold back. He removes filters. He scrunches your eyes open as he exposes all the possible ugly truths in anything you may find beautiful. Sometimes, he makes you realize that ugly truths are the exact reasons why things are beautiful in the first place.
These realizations came back when I read Invisible Monsters Remix. I’ve been meaning to read Invisible Monsters for a long time, but I somehow got distracted by other genres—the lighter ones, those that spell the meaning of “escape” instead of those that enumerate why you really can’t get away from reality even through books.
In a recent book fair, I chanced upon a copy of Invisible Monsters’ “director’s cut” edition, Remix. The cover features a skinny blonde model whose disheveled hair was brushed to cover about three-fourths of her face, one dark eye staring out passively for dramatic effect. There was a bit of red paint over the picture to make for an illusion of carelessly smudged lipstick, a wonderful symbol for the book’s subjects if you ask me: the protagonist’s “post-accident” appearance, the fashion industry, the complexity of sexuality, plastic surgery, and violence (that paint could actually be blood and not lipstick at all…or maybe it’s both, who knows?). The texts’ jagged font looked as if a lipstick was used to write them. My point is, everything about the cover drew me in. It’s just too Palahniuk to resist, the bits I said about beauty and ugliness above present in it. Even if I haven’t read the edited version, I bought the book without second thoughts.
Invisible Monsters Remix revolves around the story of a fashion model whose career and charmed life came to a halt when an “accident” leaves her disfigured and unable to speak. She becomes friends with pill-popping Brandy Alexander, and together they travel—conning people, rummaging big houses for drugs, and in the end finding out who they really are and what significant roles they play in each other’s lives.
The chapters jump around literally; there are footnotes telling you to turn to this chapter or that, almost in a Choose Your Own Adventure style minus its alternate-endings effect. The first release of Invisible Monsters years ago wasn’t as topsy-turvy as this; however, Remix contains Palahniuk’s original vision of the novel so I was content to have read it first. The structure’s purpose is to make it so that it resembles a magazine to complement its subject matter. It doesn’t affect the story in a major way, and to be honest I think Palahniuk didn’t have to do that at all, since the contents of every chapter jump around in time and dimension anyway.
Typical of Palahniuk’s characters, everyone in this book is screwed up in one degree or another. I wanted to fully grasp the narrator’s way of thinking, but it just drifts farther and farther away from normal as the chapters go (but then again, I wouldn’t blame her after everything that has happened to her). She projects as a mad example for the society’s obsession with attention the same way Brandy Alexander is an icon for the society’s obsession with beauty and perfection.
Story-wise, I fell in love with it. The narrator spews out the tale in staccatos of flashbacks and vivid imagery that held the plot intact until the bittersweet end. This is one of the few books I’ve read that contain more than one major plot twist that didn’t come out as lame or forced—at every reveal, I find myself wanting to release a thread of curses. I love how in his best satirical approach, Palahniuk showed that grit and glam are the conjoined twins of the reality of everything and everyone that values beauty as a very important “commodity.”
For a very memorable read, I’m giving Invisible Monsters Remix four stars.
____
Cross-posted to my blogspot.
Photo by maddiespictures.
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“We, each of us, can take control of the world.”
-Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Fight Club (1999)
Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth
Cast: Edward Norton (The Narrator/Jack), Brad Pitt (Tyler Durden), Helena Bonham Carter (Marla Singer), Meat Loaf (Robert “Bob” Paulsen), Jared Leto (Angel Face), Zach Grenier (Richard Chesler)
Based on the book by: Chuck Palahniuk
Director: David Fincher
duplicated post :P
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Writer friends, I discovered a fun website today. It’s called “I Write Like” and here’s the description:
Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
Let me know which autor you got!
Writer friends, I discovered a fun website today. It’s called “I Write Like” and here’s the description:
Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
Let me know which autor you got!Arthur Clarke apparently
And Stephen King
She’d read enough to know she was missing a lot.
She’d read enough, in fact, that she’d been able to identify and diagnose a large void in her life that had previously gone unnoticed. It was almost frustrating, then, that she needed to fill it.
Books weren’t enough, unfortunately. They had been before, when she’d craved adventure and managed to lose herself in Nancy Drew as a teenager, or when her anger had bubbled up coming out of college and Chuck Palahniuk. Somehow now, when she needed it the most, literature was finding itself coming up short, a bridge that only reached halfway across the gulf. A medicine that only treated the symptoms, rather than eradicated the cause.
No, this was the kind of hole in her life that would require her to actually live it, as scary as that seemed. This was the kind of hole that demanded that she step out of the door and be Nancy Drew, actually go out and find the adventure for herself, rather than just experience it second hand. She’d have to find the perspective that drove Palahniuk to make the caustic observations that he did.
She’d have to find herself someone to make her kneel, and the thought terrified her.
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