Book Review
Publisher: Random House. Maybe...Tyz, who is it?
Tue, 4 January 2005
by: Tyz
I read the novel Fight Club before it became a blockbuster movie starring Brad Pitt.
The above sentence is a total lie, but how cool would it be if it was true? I would have a lot of literary street-cred (there is such a thing; it just comes from a better class of street).
Like most people I saw the film, then read the book, and then I read everything I could get my hands on that was written by Chuck Palahniuk. The anti-heroes that live in his novels break the rules of morality and legality, but still we identify with them. Their motives are more complex than simple tales of good guys and bad guys – moral ambivalence is the status quo. These stories often have twists and turns that prove that quite often the truth is not stranger than fiction.
From reading his work, you would have to imagine Palahniuk living in a nightmare world where the chain smoking deviant is king and the manic depressive nympho his queen. What we get in his new book Non-Fiction is a different side to Palahniuk, and it sheds a new, and much more sympathetic, light on his fictional creations. Palahniuk describes in his introduction how most of his stories are about people wanting to be together – outcasts celebrating the fact they don't fit in, or decent folk relishing the fact that they do.
Unlike Palahniuk's earlier work Fugitives and Refugees, Non-Fiction is a less personal book – and this is probably a good thing. Fugitives and Refugees reads like some kind of surreal Lonely Planet guidebook. Non-Fiction on the other hand is a series of interviews, journalistic reporting and personal reminiscences by the author. Some of the inspiration behind Palahniuk's literary creations is revealed, and we also get some insight into why middle aged American meant would want to devote their lives to building medieval castles.
Some of the stories in Non-Fiction you will want to get through quickly, others you will wish they went on forever. Like the reality it portrays, this book is not always "on" but there is always something going on.
by: Tyz
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