Book 40 - Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

There's less than a month to go, and I've still got twelve more books to read. I read eleven last month, so it's doable, but it's going to take some work. I guess I need to shut up and get to the review.

Book 40 - Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk.

The first rule of Fight Club is: "You don't talk about Fight Club."

The second rule of Fight Club is: "You don't talk about Fight Club."

The narrator of this novel can't sleep. He works in a corporate job coordinating product recall, plugging numbers into a spreadsheet that weighs the cost of the recall against the likelihood that people will get hurt or killed and sue. And he can't sleep. No, it's worse than that, he can't feel. He goes to support groups for ailments he doesn't have and finds cathartic release through the suffering of others. This works at first, and for a while after one of these episodes he can seemingly close his eyes and get some rest, but eventually it's not enough – once again he can’t sleep.

Then he meets Tyler Durden. Tyler shows him a whole new way to feel alive, through the physical pain of bare-knuckle brawling. Tyler and the narrator start Fight Club, an underground fighting match where ordinary men from all walks of life come to beat each other’s brains out. Two men to a fight. One fight at a time. Fights last as long as they have to. If it’s your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight. No exceptions.

For a while this works. The narrator has never felt more alive as right after a fight, but Tyler is not satisfied. He first expands and franchises Fight Club, and then uses it as a recruitment tool for Project Mayhem, which uses violence and mischief to create anarchy in hopes that what remains after society falls will at least be better than their current existence.

This was Chuck Palahniuk first published effort, and it’s a great one. It is wonderfully wicked book, full of brutal satire. Many people might be turned off by the large amount of graphically described violence, but really that’s what the book is all about: the characters are using this violence to escape their seemingly pointless lives – even if just for an evening - and feel something, even if it is mind-numbing, bone-crushing pain. When this is no longer enough, it almost seems logical that Tyler would export this idea to dealing with the general public, using mayhem to try to shock them out of their day-to-day existence.

I never saw the movie, except for a clip or two here and there, so I don’t know how true it was to the book. So much of this story revolves around what’s going on with the narrator and his thoughts about his job, his insomnia, and his relationships with Tyler and Marla. There’s a reason he remains nameless, but I won’t say what it is. I have already said to much. Remember, no matter what, "You don't talk about Fight Club."