A Review of Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Cover

This is a book that has been on my "to read" list for a while. I had seen bits and pieces of the movie and it wasn't until years later that I was made aware that the 1999 movie Fight Club was based on the eponomous 1996 book Fight Club. I knew that fighting, there was soap, there was violence, and there was Edward Norton with a boring desk job wearing a tie. That was about it.

Cracking open this book was like watching GoPro footage from a downhill mountain bike race. Fast paced and energetic. The unnamed narrator has a boring desk job, a condo filled with crap that he thought buying would make him happy and the inability to sleep. For the past two years he has been attending medical support groups in order to find a sliver of peace and to be able to get a good nights rest. Until Marla enters his life and he loses his one area of escape. He can no longer sleep.

Enter Tyler Durden. The famous character played by Brad Pitt in the movie. Tyler is the unnamed narrators friend who gets them into mayhem. Literally. Tyler and the narrator start a club valled Fight Club. Where unsatisfied men go to a bar's basement and fight one another. No feel something. To feel tired. To feel their muscles used. To feel pain. To escape their boring lives.

Tyler Durden keeps on going further and further with the antics. He sets up shop in an abandoned house on Paper Street and starts making soap, training an army of followers, and cutting of the balls of people who try to stop fight club.

Very interesting book. I see why so many young men have read and re-read this book and why people who watch the movie or read the book get inspired. Their lives are boring. Hell, my life is sometimes boring too. A white collar desk job can only bring so much to your life. Yeah it brings you money and that money can afford you to buy yourself stuff and things. But we see that with the narrator. Money doesn't buy you a life that you are satisfied with. So people read this book and they get inspired. Maybe they start their own soap company. But as we hear in the afterword by Palahnuik, they usually find someone to fight. And then they can sport their newly bruised faces and feel something.

Good prose, good story, good characters, good twist.