Chosen By - Susan
Jan 2005 For Discussion Feb 2005
Review
From the author of the international sensation Fight Club, a powerful (and hilarious) novel about love and strife between mothers and sons, the addictive power of sex, the terrors of aging, the ugly truth about historical theme parks, and much else...
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's controversial and blazingly original debut novel, introduced a fresh and even renegade talent to American fiction, one who has retooled the classic black humor of Terry Southern and Kurt Vonnegut for the lunacy of the millennial age. In his new novel, Choke, he gives readers a vision of life and love and sex and mortality that is both chillingly brilliant and teeth-rattlingly funny.
Victor Mancini, a dropout from medical school, has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's elder care: Pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who "saves you" will feel responsible for the rest of his life. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of checks, week in, week out. Between fake choking gigs, Victor works at Colonial Dunsboro with a motley group of losers and stoners trapped in 1734, cruises sex addiction groups for action ("You put twenty sexaholics around a table night after night and don't be surprised."), and visits his mother, whose anarchic streak made his childhood a mad whirl and whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his (possibly divine?) parentage. An antihero for our deranging times, Victor's whole existence is a struggle to wrest an identity from overwhelming forces. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.
About the Author:
Chuck Palahniuk's three novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Survivor, and Invisible Monsters. Portions of Choke have appeared in Playboy, and his nonfiction work has been published by Gear, Black Book, The Stranger, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Score
Carol: 9/10
Gill: 5/10
Jill: 5/10
Karen: 6/10
Nicola: 5/10
Rachel: 6/10
Susan: 9/10
Average Score: 6.4/10
1 comment:
I found this book enjoyable to read. It felt very different to books we have read as a group before. It had a lot to say about the lengths that people will go to get adoration from others. That may be in the form of an addiction (sex addiction in this case) or cooking up some crazy scheme to fake choking in restaurants. Victor felt like quite a tragic character that seemed proud at times to be so irreverent and antiestablishment. However it all turns round and he seems to have some shame regarding his lack of morals when he thinks he discovers his mother's secret about him.
Post a Comment